Beelbeebub

Chesterton's Fence is very much a thing and the likes of trump, RTKjr and Hegseth have absolutely no idea what the parable means.

I'm actually not surprised. The stuff that makes a country run happens pretty invisibly most of the time. Roads get repaired, bridges inspected, food hygiene is checked, school busses organised, flu clinics set up, bins collected, planning decided etc and nobody really noticed *until* something goes wrong. Then we notice and moan about how shit it is. The civil service is like plumbing - we only think about it when it goes wrong and what is there is a confusing jumble but replacing it is a ton of cost, disruption and work and often creates entirely new problems.

The speed and simplicity of the Brexit process was legendary ...

I don't think people quite understand how vital the civil service (and to be clear there are huge areas that need improvement) is to a smoothly running country - and yes the UK is a smoothly running country on comparison to alot of countries. The US has recently gone on a civil service slashing spree. Lots of parks and environment people fired. Cutting monitoring of diseases and food standards. Huge cuts of "dei" at the pentagon. They now have raging wildfires, explosive diarrhea and salmonella outbreaks and their sailors are jumping off ships because conditions are so bad

The greens have quite an extensive program of nationalising big utilities and taxing oil companies ....

I'm really not Those graphs are from the North Sea transition authority and the absolute difference between net zero projection and "drill baby drill" is bugger all. Every single projection has long term decline. Even the most wildly optimistic oil industry projection has decline to 25% of current production over a decade. This is a good example of reading the statistics you want to see... Industry uses 10% of gas demand. On current track the UK will produce enough gas to supply only industry in a decade. If we go wild and do absolutely everything the oil industry can think of we could supply industry and others. If we go big on renewables for the grid (net zero) then the "transformation" chunk will shrink massively And if we go big on heat pumps (net zero) then the domestic but will also shrink dramatically.

"UK plc" doesn't really exist so we would need to set up a nationalised oil company with storage etc and some legal framework to define who they can and cannot sell to. Which is fine, but we'd have to do it - with all the attendant faff (parliament, setting up the structure, hiring peeps etc. And the resource is dwindling. By 2030 it will be half what it is now. And who thinks we can set up this national company by then? The time to do it would have been around 1980. just to reiterate - THERE IS NO OIL AND GAS BONANZA JUST WAITING FOR US TO CLAIM IT. Nobody, not even the oil industry thinks there is. The only people who say there is are Trump, Farage, Badenoch and their circle.

Curtailment payments also happen for gas power stations. The grid buys firm future generation. If the grid can't use it, it's not the generators fault. Likewise there are penalties for not delivering that firm generation. Imagine booking caterers for a big event and then telling them, when they turn up ready, because not as many people came or the car park is full. You'd quickly find caterers would build the cost of cancellation into their quotes and you'd never know how much it cost to do the catering because it would be muddled up with the cost of you canceling them. The grid is building out new capacity especially at the known bottlenecks. I think by 2030 alot of the current curtailment costs will fall away (though total curtailment may rise simply because of the higher renewables overalls)

I'm not certain the geophysics works like that. Some fields are interconnected across national boundaries but I don't think all are and even those that are connected aren't strongly coupled. It's not a big cave of gas or oil, more like a giant sponge where the gas and oil moves slowly - which is why we need multiple wells in one field. So if the UK doesn't extract from them nobody else can either. "Reserved for UK use only" is easy to say but hard to implement. There are no private "UK" only oil companies. They are all multinational. So you'd need to set up one specially. Then what is "uk use only" - selling to a UK refinery (assuming one is set up for the oil). What if that refinery sells abroad? What if the UK wholesaler the refinery sells to wants to sell abroad? How far down the chain do we go?

Sorry, fat thumbs.

Yeah, i'd have thought so too.

What is slightly annoying is my inverter limits by power - which varies the amps as the voltage goes up and down. My voltage is regularly high 240's so i could export about 4kw but occasionally it dips to 230 or so which is only 3.6kw It would be nice if the inverter had a current limit export

I should have said export power - 16A export limit.

Yes. 8kw inverter 3.6kw export

Yes with a suitable battery and inverter you don't need to spread the generation via different orientation. On a slight tangent, my 24 panels system occupies the 12 degree mono pitch of a roughly 7x7m footprint carport. That's 50m2ish. Or about the footprint of modern 3bed house (about 100m2 over both floors). It strikes me that you could provide any house with 24 panels if you use a low mono pitch. Sure some would be sub optimal in terms of orientation or shading but even shaded or on an overcast days they put out 500w or so - enough for base load. It was about £3k in panels and mounting hardware (inverter and batteries were another 7-8k) and very easy to install (low pitch, metal roof). Hardly breaking the bank for a new build. And that house would be low electricity consumption in the winter and zero in the summer. If the occupants had an electric car it would do a good deal of their "fuel" over the summer, an immersion heater or heat pump and free hot water as well. That would do very nicely against the cost of living.