Mad Dictators

[Beelbeebub]

13 minutes ago, Spinny said:

Can I look forward to your critique of the Met Office statement ?

I mean I read through it and there wasn't much wrong.

 

Personally I would have used less precise % given the inherent uncertainty in these methods.  I wouldn't say "39%" i'd say "around 1/3" I wouldn't say "59%" Icd say "over half"

 

But apart from that there want anything controversial - I mean we broke multiple records are saw exceedingly high temperatures even for August and Europe saw even worse.  We would be daft to ignore this event even if we escaped it.

Edited Thursday at 16:07 by Beelbeebub

[LnP]

@JohnMo and @Beelbeebub, all fair points but I recommend you read the piece by Dieter Helm I linked to and I'll be interested in your thoughts about his arguments.

[Spinny]

Beelbeebub - have you even read the Daily Sceptic counter article I provided a link to above ?

 

Do you know what the point is ?

 

Edited Thursday at 16:11 by Spinny

[SteamyTea]

39 minutes ago, Spinny said:

Truly the Met Office is lying to the public

It is even worse when you lie to yourself, and then believe it.

 

[-rick-]

@Spinny

 

I'm really not sure there is any point in engaging further. You claim the article is exposing lies, when all the Met Office are claiming is that they have made estimates.

 

If the article was focused more on something like 'Met Office estimates of heatwave death toll use deceptive methods' and actually showed the methods were bad then that may be different. But that's not what the article does and to be clear I don't think there is any evidence presented that the estimate is significantly wrong (I'm not saying it's right either - it's too soon to tell).

 

The graph showing the ONS death toll is a lagging indicator, it takes time for reported deaths to make their way through the system so a graph that shows less deaths last week than same time last year doesn't prove anything. You have to wait for the data to come through.

 

I've seen plenty of criticism of 'excess deaths' over time (same thing came up during covid). It's a difficult measure and the way it's used in the scientific community doesn't exactly match the way the lay-man understands it but again the article doesn't engage with that. I can't provide links or anything to backup the following but I have read various long and detailed explanations and critiques of this in the past and my conclusion from this reading is that excess death estimates we see are generally in line with reality.

Edited Thursday at 17:04 by -rick-
I removed part of this because it was a bit muddled

[-rick-]

And now I've written that I fell I've fallen (again) into the trap of talking in detail about something that doesn't warrant the time. The article is written from such a biased perspective in obvious bad faith that engaging with it is just falling into the trap of giving it more credit than it deserves.

 

Quote

Because, even if climate change and the heatwaves were real, the deaths were not.

 

This line is implying climate change is false, the heatwaves didn't happen and people didn't die from those non-existent heatwaves. It's a case of 'believe what I'm saying not what you are seeing/experiencing'

Edited Thursday at 17:04 by -rick-

[Beelbeebub]

1 minute ago, -rick- said:

I've seen plenty of criticism of 'excess deaths' over time (same thing came up during covid)

The author ignores the enormous hump in the blue and orange line that occured during the COVID epidemic but absolutely didn't show excess deaths from COVID.....😁

 

But @Spinny to address the graph fully you need to understand what was done

 

They took all the previous years (usually omitting COVID)and effectively produce a smoothed average.  If you visualise a smooth line running through *the middle* of the bundle of lines that's the baseline.

 

You then look at the number of deaths in the target period Vs that theoretical baseline -as you can see the 2026 line is towards the upper end of the "bundle" hence there are "excess deaths".  The difficult but is to differentiate between excess deaths that are abnormal and excess deaths that a normal (ie natural variation). Clearly the COVID lumps were abnormal (🤫) but the heatwave deaths, much harder to call.  It is highly likely there were excess deaths, there always are when it is hot or cold.  It's likely that there were more excess deaths as the temperature for hotter.  But the exact number, to a corpse, will never be known.

[Beelbeebub]

To drag back to the original topic.

 

The article about the solar farm was emotive (as all anti ones are) invoking the loss of "prime" land that was actually not particularly prime.

 

The second article made the "gotcha" observation that renewables do  it always produce at their peak output....  Not news and built into the calculations.  This is why we need considerably more peak capacity than our nominal maximum.  This is the calculation every one with solar panels makes.

 

I have 11kwp of panels on an 9kwh inverter feeding a house that runs about 500w continuous and peaks at maybe 7kw if we really try.

 

Why have I got so many panels? Because it means they produce enough to power the house even in sub optimal conditions (most of the time)

 

It's the same with our national capacity -we will prob need something like 2 or 3x our nominal peak demand, so north of 120gw peak.  Will we ever see that demand? Hopefully not!  But it means that the system will still be able to provide a significant amount of our national demand even when operating at 20, 25% of maximum

 

[Beelbeebub]

1 hour ago, LnP said:

@JohnMo and @Beelbeebub, all fair points but I recommend you read the piece by Dieter Helm I linked to and I'll be interested in your thoughts about his arguments.

To break his arguments down by section

1. He makes the mistake that declining N.Sea production is a choice - it isn't the rate of decline is slightly modifiable but not to any significant degree. We are arguing over the green line or the red line.

He also makes the mistake that our high gas and electricity prices are due to us deliberately running down our production. Aside from my point above, they are high due to the high price of gas and the international price of gas is not changed by the UK output.  The price is set by the international markets and those are (nominally)supply and demand.  Even at best, our output is too small to change the international price.

 

It should be noted that the rise in electricity prices and gas prices was very closely correlated in 2022 because a much larger proportion of our electricity came from gas.  In 2026 the rise was much less direct because less of our electricity comes from gas.

 

He talks about the supply chains for renewables being dirty and having emissions. This is a variation of the landman rant (and the "EV's will never pay back the carbon used in making the battery" argument before that). Study after study shows wind turbines, solar panels and EVs are all net negative for carbon well within their lifetime. It also ignores the carbon and pollution from fossil fuel extraction as a comparison.

 

2. He talks about "what happens is the gas prices fall?" Well, they will eventually for a while,until the next crisis. Then they will  fall again until the next crisis and so on.  So far we have had 2 massive "once in a lifetime" shocks in the current decade -that we are only half way through...

 

Does anyone want to bet Trump doesn't do something stupid I'm the next 2 and a bit years.

 

What would happen to oil prices if the world's largest oil producer suffered massive political instability? Say a the kind caused when a leader who loses an election tries to cling to power using a paramilitary police force or even elements of the armed forces....

 

Who wants to say that is fantasy land?

 

3. He seems to get mixed up on the cost of capacity. With renewables capacity is a more statistical figure than gas plants etc.

 

With ccgt plant the peak cavity is easy. Just an engineering question -"that plant, at full chat, will produce 2GW of electricity."

 

With renewables there is a theoretical capacity - what if everything was perfect, but that's only a few % of the time.  A better question would be "what is the 95% available capacity" ie the level it can produce 95% (or whatever arbitrary figure you want) of the time.  So my 11kwp solar array has a 95% figure closer to 1kw  (during daylight obviously).

 

Essentially we will have to dump a load of capital into building these assets.  Once e have built them they will provide cheap energy for decades.  Or we could kee the capital and dole it out to buy oil and gas as we need it.  That's our choice.

 

Right enough for now....

[Roger440]

On 16/07/2026 at 15:35, -rick- said:

I don't regard any publication or author who don't follow journalistic ethics to be journalism. I want my news to seek truth, cite sources, to accurately quote statements (rather than selectively quote just the bit that agrees with viewpoint of the article), etc. The Daily Sceptic is not that, it imitates that.

 

 

Would you be so good as to enlighten us as to these truthful sources please?

[Roger440]

On 15/07/2026 at 20:40, SteamyTea said:

 

 

I am going to repeat what I said about cost. Wind and PV are the cheapest forms of, and it is coming in bold , NEW generation.

It is not competing with the same contracts as legacy generation.

 

So you keep saying.

 

When will my electricity bill come down by a meaningful amount?

[SteamyTea]

4 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

When will my electricity bill come down by a meaningful amount?

Go to the ONS and get they data sets for household wages and electricity prices. Plot them and see what they show. It is easy enough to do.

[Beelbeebub]

11 hours ago, Roger440 said:

So you keep saying.

 

When will my electricity bill come down by a meaningful amount?

When gas prices fall.

 

And when they do, they'll eventually go up again the next time some geopolitical cluster fork disrupts gas supplies again.

 

But so far this year renewables have displaced just shy of 2/3 of the gas we would have had to buy which has cushioned the blow to electricity prices.

 

The most recent energy price cap raised gas prices by 25% but electricity by only 5% partly because of this displacement.

[SteamyTea]

6 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

When gas prices fall.

Well they are going to allow more drilling and extraction, so should be next Tuesday.

We will see unquestionably next tuesday if it happens.

Edited 12 hours ago by SteamyTea

[JohnMo]

1 minute ago, SteamyTea said:

Well they are going to allow more drilling and extraction, so should be next Tuesday.

But pretty unlikely to drive oil and gas prices either way, as they are set globally by the markets.

[Beelbeebub]

2 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Well they are going to allow more drilling and extraction, so should be next Tuesday.

😁🤣

 

I doubt an increase of around 30Twh in a world using 40,000 Twh a year is going to do much!

[Roger440]

11 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

Go to the ONS and get they data sets for household wages and electricity prices. Plot them and see what they show. It is easy enough to do.

 

Thats historic, not future.

 

My question remains. Specifically about what will happen in the future. And we all know the answer, ie, it will keep on going up.

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, Roger440 said:

Thats historic, not future

It may show that electricity is not that expensive in reality.

But you have to do your own research, you will not believe it otherwise.

[Roger440]

7 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

It may show that electricity is not that expensive in reality.

But you have to do your own research, you will not believe it otherwise.

 

I have, and i know its at the upper end compared to most of our peers. Especially non domestic. Which is probably actually causing more harm than the domestic price.

 

That is, however, a diversion, because it was you that keeps saying it will get cheaper, but given the market structure, i cant see how. Im still waiting for that explanation.

[ProDave]

We have had Ed keep telling us the only way electricity prices will come down is more renewables.

 

BUT what he does not tell us, is the more renewables we have won't make any difference while we have the ridiculous market set by the highest cost generator, usually gas.  So until gas is only used occasionally the prices will remain much the same.,

 

A change to the market system could bring prices down sooner, and in a way that gradually reduces as more renewables come on line.  Does our next PM have the balls to stir up the market and actually do something?

[-rick-]

13 hours ago, Roger440 said:

Would you be so good as to enlighten us as to these truthful sources please?

 

Yes it's a good question and unfortunately there isn't much around (at least not in terms of 'here is a publication that fully meets these standards'). Even sources that often have good journalistic content often depart from those standards when covering some topics. Pretty much most high quality journalism is now behind paywalls which makes it worse.

 

It's much easier to rule out some publications as unreliable than it is to rule them in as reliable.

 

So for me now I tend to look at news less. I have a highly curated set of social media follows and tend to use those as a starting point when they link to articles. Then you have to think through each article on it's own merits. No easy answers though and I'm sure it's why society as a whole is spending so much time arguing about things rather than moving forward and making things better.

[SteamyTea]

14 hours ago, Roger440 said:

When will my electricity bill come down by a meaningful amount

That was your question.

2 hours ago, Roger440 said:

I have, and i know its at the upper end compared to most of our peers

Then you change the question.

2 hours ago, Roger440 said:

Especially non domestic

And changed it again.

2 hours ago, Roger440 said:

Im still waiting for that explanation.

If you stuck to the original question, you may get helpful answers, it is then up to you to verify the data source, people on here are not your secretaries.

 

I think what you want to know, and this is pure speculation on my behalf, is 'when will my individual electricity bill be lower, in nominal terms, that it has ever been?'

That I cannot help you with as it is a nonsense question.

Edited 9 hours ago by SteamyTea

[JohnMo]

14 hours ago, Roger440 said:

When will my electricity bill come down by a meaningful amount?

Maybe next week? But likely not, although there is rumours about the pricing structure may change and somethings being moved to general taxation, instead on the kWh pricing. Who knows in reality. 

 

Get you solar panels up and then add some more.

[Roger440]

48 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

Maybe next week? But likely not, although there is rumours about the pricing structure may change and somethings being moved to general taxation, instead on the kWh pricing. Who knows in reality. 

 

Get you solar panels up and then add some more.

Which is the correct answer. 

 

Assertions that renewables will make electricity cheaper are in fact the nonsense. They "could". But they wont.

 

[Spinny]

The move planned to reduce electricity prices is a sham. It is simply proposed to pay some of the cost from general taxation so that the cost you APPEAR to be paying goes down on your bill. All it means is you will be paying through increased taxation, and quite possibly through somebody else's increased taxation.

 

I am afraid that almost always whenever governments introduce price controls and subsidy arrangements it is bad news. What it does is to distort the market and behaviours no longer reflect the proper economic cost of things.