Comments by "Michael RCH" (@michaelrch) on "Can onshore wind revolution lower energy bills in the UK?" video.

@joeblogs6598 Texas has a highly deregulated energy market dominated by fossil fuels. Did you see what happened when they had a cold snap a couple of years ago? Due to low standards for weatherisation (protection from severe weather) which the energy companies had lobbied government to scrap, about a tenth of the system went offline overnight. People were being charged literally tens of thousands of dollars per day for power which they had no choice but to buy to avoid freezing to death in their homes. Grow up, Markets aren't the solution to every problem. Life isn't that simple.
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They coexist easily with farming. In fact they can help farmers keep their farms going by providing them extra income in the form of rental for use of some of the land.
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You're right. Kinda. The market structure is the problem. That needs to change to mean that the wholesale price isn't set by the most expensive source at any given time. If that was fixed (and to be fair it's a fiddly problem) then this cheap energy would actually bring down prices for consumers.
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Offshore turbines going up now produce 12-14MW each. So 71 of them (a midsize wind farm) is the same power as a large nuclear reactor. But the power from a new nuclear reactor costs about 18p/KWh (that number goes up every year) while the power from an offshore wind farm costs 4p/KWh (that numbers goes down every year). Onshore wind btw is about 3p/KWh. And while the turbines are a bit smaller (because it's impossible to move 120m long single piece blades on land) they are much cheaper to put up and install. They max out at 4.2MW at the moment. So each one powers about 2500 homes. Not bad considering you can park them in a field with farming going on around them and they take about a year to build.
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Skidmore, that rare thing - a halfway sensible Tory. Still voted for austerity over and over of course!
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Where? How is this cost taxpayers anything?
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@nighttrain1236 err very well usually. The water industry was better before privatisation. The rail industry was better before privatisation AND before the Thatcher government starved it of cash. Indeed the best rail systems in the world are usually state owned (Switzerland, France, etc). The royal mail was better before it was privatised. etc The energy industry in countries like France and Norway are publicly owned and they are both effective and cheap. The trouble is that neoliberals arent stupid. Before they sell off public industries they run them into the ground deliberately so they can then present privatisation as a magic solution. But it isn't. It's "selling off the family silver" as Harold MacMillan put it and it's a giant con at our expense. You can see exactly the same horribly insidious dynamic taking place with the NHS. Years and years of underfunding paired with gradually privatising (and increasing the cost of) chunks of the system to make way for profit-driven provision. As well as an incredibly bureaucratic and unnecessary internal market that has raised expenditure on admin from 4% in 1981 to over 20% now. Its' not like large corporations run "internal markets". They know it is stupid and inefficient. But it is dogma in public services now as a way to make way for privatisation. Anyway, to sum up, some of the best public utilities and transportation systems in the world are publicly owned and run. And ours can be as well.
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Ah but that's the beauty of renewables. They are impossible to monopolise because the barrier to entry is so low. In the past, if your town (say), wanted to set up its own energy supply, that was flat out impossible. The supply chains required to operate a fossil fuel plant are massive and global and dominated by a small number of huge companies. Think mines, processing, plant construction, maintenance, machinery, etc etc No community can do all this do you are reliant on those big greedy corporations, as you say, and you're permanently screwed. But with renewables, all you need to do is buy some solar panels, a wind turbines or two, probably a battery and a connection to the local grid and that's 99% of the job done. Renewables don't just clean up the energy system. They open the door to radically democratising it as well. 😀
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10:58 the sound of Miliband knowing he (and the country) has been betrayed by Starmer
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Onshore wind costs about a third what it's costs to produce power using gas, and about a 6th of what it costs using nuclear.
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Because the Tories are funded by building companies who don't want to have to cut they'd margins by making good quality houses to high standards like other countries do. Short answer: corruption.
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3:06 hilarious cognitive dissonance here! How can I say "I don't like the look of them" without saying it.
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5:41 oh FFS. This again! Where is the EVIDENCE that ULEZ was why the Tories held a seat that they had held for 40 YEARS ALREADY???!!
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Amen
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@quadq6598 you want to spend 6x more on electricity? No thanks.
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@davidwarnes5158 neoliberal capitalism's fault.
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@davidwarnes5158 I take if you're using the word "communism" in jest... Sizewell C will cost about £38 billion, of which £9 billion will come directly from taxpayers, meanwhile another £10 billion will come from bill payers BEFORE its even built. So this is a case of bill-payers giving the builder of the station a giant interest free loan because they don't want to borrow the money at commercial rates. Because if they did, the whole project would be unviable. Literally no other form of generation would go near financing like this. It's absurd. Meanwhile onshore wind is now the cheapest form of every available and it requires no subsidy. And it can be built in 1-2 years, vs 15+ years for nuclear. Tell me again why you want to pay 6x more for your electricity?
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@davidwarnes5158 no it isn't all the same. No one is being asked to put £9 billion of TAXES into a wind farm. No one is being made to pay for the building of wind turbines 15 years in advance of them turning on with no interest paid on their compulsory loan to the builder. The energy market needs significant reform to allow all the cost reductions of cheap renewables to flow to customers but there is no doing whatsoever that renewables save bill-payers and taxpayers a fortune compared to every other form of energy, especially nuclear.
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@struanmills5710 they definitely are. The industry body Energy U.K. have been working on this with ofGen for a while. But it will take a while because it genuinely is quite fiddly.
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@joeblogs6598 you do know that market fundamentalism and deregulation leads directly to monopoly, oligarchy, falling standards of living for working people and ever rising inequality right? What you are arguing for is a system that will impoverish everyone except the owners of large corporations. Snd this isn't speculation. In the US, since the introduction of neoliberal policy in the 1980s, real wages have flatlined while the top 1% have received and upward transfer of wealth of $40 trillion. And during the same period, trend growth has fallen every decade. Btw I am in the 1%. I am a business owner employing dozens on people. And even I can see how horrible what you are advocating is. It has terrible outcomes for the vast majority of people and it fails on its own terms, unless of course your only goal is to further enrich the richest in society. It's very effective at doing that. Your understanding of economics is so shallow and naive that I won't respond to your comments any more, but have at it defending an obviously broken economic ideology.
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@joeblogs6598 I will only answer the last question which is yes, we have given our staff inflation-matching pay rises, because we put them before our profits.
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@nighttrain1236 by removing the need to pay shareholders profits?
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@nighttrain1236 I am not advocating for nationalising everything. Only major utilities that are natural monopolies. On trains, the U.K. spends almost exactly the same im subsidies, £11bn in 22/23, but it gets an absolutely embarrassing railways network in return. I am not against properly regulated markets - there is no such thing as a "free market" - but they have their limits, either due to the tendency of the market to favour natural monopolies (rail, water, energy, mail, etc) or where the services are too important to the running of a functional and civilised society (health, education, policing, fire brigades, etc). The last 45 years have clearly demonstrated the limits of privatisation of the industries. That needs to be reversed. The social democratic consensus of the post war period led to faster and more fairly shared growth in the economy and overall prosperity than the failed neoliberal experiment that followed it. We need to learn that lesson and get back to a much more rational balance in the economy between what is run for profit by corporations and what is run for the public good by the public sector.
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@nighttrain1236 and you didn't mention that the French system is twice as big as the U.K. system and has 50% more ridership in passenger km than the U.K. system. AND IT ACTUALLY WORKS!! Tbh even the French system isn't a patch on the Swiss system. That is just an f-ing miracle of engineering, design, planning and organisation. It is so good, it seems like you are in some future utopia. And obviously it's publicly owned and run.
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@nighttrain1236 I don't know what point you're making but at least in a publicly owned system, the subsidies aren't unnecessarily going directly to pay the dividends of pointless shareholders who add nothing.
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@nighttrain1236 @nighttrain1236 Wrong on several counts there. I mean its a nice talking point, but its a lie (not your lie, the lie of right wing narratives generally) Let's take the water industry as an example. Since privatisation, it has borrowed £53 billion. It has taken £72 billion in dividends. 20% of customers' are now paying to service debt that the industry took on to pay itself dividends. And what was the outcome? The worst water system of any developed nation. Illegal spills of sewage across the entire system on a almost continual basis. Illegal water quality in almost every river in the country. AND rising costs for consumers. Also you say that shareholders invest in creating productivity. No, they invest in creating profits. These can be very different things in practice, especially in poorly functioning markets. You have to give up the idea that markets work in all industries. They simply don't. And where markets don't work, then any private, profit-drivem enterprise in that market is going to abuse the market for its own profits. Things like water, rail, buses, the mail system, etc are natural monopolies. They do worse when privatised for everyone except for the shareholders who get to cream off profits rain or shine. I run a business myself. I understand why market dynamics are helpful in the right industry, but you have to get off this ideological faith in markets and accept that they have their limits when it comes to overall utility and efficiency. I will use the example of the Swiss transport system again. The Swiss public transport system is the best in Europe. It is probably one of the best in the world. And the reason is because it is meticulously planned and designed to be incredibly reliable and efficient. Does this server the bottom line of some shareholders somewhere. No. But it serves the Swiss people who use it incredibly well. Here is a video that demonstrates just how good it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPcHs-E4qc If this system was sold off and fragmented among multiple providers, the entire system would fall to bits in a sea of market bureaucracy, broken scheduling and interoperation, horribly complex ticketing and fee structures. It works because it is a national monopoly that is centrally planned and well funded. And that makes it some thing that the Swiss are justifiably extremely proud off. Unlike the UK train system which is an international embarrassment.
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That neoliberal government for that. It's a shame on Labour that they don't reverse that. The Greens would though ✅
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Wait 15 years for power that 6x more expensive? No thanks.
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