Buildings in the US

[SteamyTea]

7 hours ago, Mike said:

https://www.slrconsulting.com/insights/carbon-and-energy-newsletter-july-2026/

Thanks, I had forgotten that this was happening.

ETS has been quietly plodding along in the background and does not seem to have affected costs too badly.

[Bancroft]

On 01/08/2026 at 10:59, MortarThePoint said:

the average UK electricity price is 26p/kWh

Much of this is due to electric taking the majority of the tax burden - away from gas.

 

It always strikes me as odd that successive governments want better energy security (including not importing gas) but continue to hit electrical supply with the burden of taxation in order to make gas cheaper.

 

And then spend millions on offsetting wind farms for not dumping electricity on to the grid!

 

I presume they don't want to lose votes from people who still have gas boilers...

 

But, if they switched the subsidies/taxes around that would be a prime reason for people to start moving to electricity over a relatively short period of time as they got stung by higher gas prices.

[G and J]

Remember the first priority of any politician is to get re-elected.  

[Bancroft]

18 hours ago, G and J said:

Remember the first priority of any politician is to get re-elected.  

And the quote from Jean-Paul Junkers - "Every politician knows what they should do.  What they don't know is how to get elected again afterwards".

[FluxyCored]

On 31/07/2026 at 22:24, MortarThePoint said:

I found the video below and interesting watch from a UK perspective. I'm not knocking it in any way, but it highlights the difference between UK building regulations and the US. It's worth noting that they build much larger homes in the US and are much more likely to have AC. There are also many more homes in the US. In the UK, we go a long way to make our houses perform more effectively in deference to the climate impact, but we all share one atmosphere and a single US home may have an impact 3-4 times as large as a UK one and there are probably 6 times as many. It's easy to start to doubt our approach in the UK, but worth keeping an eye on the personal financial impact as well as the environmental benefit.

 

As an example, at 13:28 they show the floor insulation which is US R10 and looks to be about 50mm of XPS. R10 in UK units is a U-value of 0.57 W/m²K. Air interfaces etc may lower that to something like 0.5 W/m²K, but the limiting value for building regulations in the UK is 0.18 W/m²K and the notional value is 0.13 W/m²K. Just considering that and the larger footprint area in the US makes a huge difference. Various Google searches suggest that the average footprint in the US is over twice that in the UK. If you assume the same weather, that means they pass about 6 times a much heat through the floor as a UK house. The roof and walls also wouldn't come close to meeting UK building regulations values and are of much greater area.

 

Are we over doing it in the UK?

    

 

That is really nice. only $750,000. Over here it would be £5,000,000

[JohnMo]

1 minute ago, FluxyCored said:

That is really nice. only $750,000. Over here it would be £5,000,000

But how much of that £5,000,000 is land cost.  Wouldn't be anywhere that in Scotland - land is way cheaper and so is labour.