The UK is leading the western world in renewables in many ways, yet our bills are some of the most expensive.
The UK isn’t leading they way. They’re dragged kicking and screaming because they no longer have access to cheap Russian fuel. They’ve made it into the 45% bracket, which is good but not exceptional.
Sweden, Finland and Denmark had the highest RES (Renewable energy source) shares among Member States in 2024 due to strong hydro industries (Sweden and Finland), wind power and wide use of solid biofuels for district heating. All of which are driven by public investment and administration.
UK drop off in carbon emissions over the last 40 years has largely been the result of deindustrialization and exporting of manufacturing abroad. They still consume a great deal of carbon per capita. They just do it by purchasing finished goods from overseas.
Of late, they’ve also been rebuilding their old dirty energy economy to power AI datacenters.
How many nuclear plants?
Reminder that China’s competent government has done exactly this, and as a result they produce 93% of the world’s solar photovoltaic panels.
Can we get the competency with out the whole… Everything else?
Or is our choice between awful and ineffective or awful and effective?
awful and effective?
It’s bad to do green energy when you’re Chinese because… ?
What’s the awful everything else? China has consistently some of the highest government satisfaction rates in the world
As a Spaniard, it’s hard to conceive 90+% of the population being satisfied with the central government, everyone here hates our government and politicians.
Are you sure you’re speaking for Chinese people when you criticize whatever “everything else” you refer to?
“When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds soon follow”
John Dean
So 1.4 billion Chinese are essentially suffering Stockholm Syndrome from the evil Chinese Government, and their satisfaction rates have nothing to do with the consistently increasing living standards?
Bold of you to assume the government cares about you at all.
This argument has received responses calling me a Commie, a Tankie, and ‘a would-be enslaver of humanity’ from family, friends, and internet randoms alike.
For me it is that I just… sorta listened to Bill Nye in the 90s about carbon dioxide.
I am pretty sure 90% of people who get called tankies on Lemmy are not communists. Tankie-calling is by far the most obnoxious Lemmy community pastime. But I’ll give them this, it’s an extremely annoying word, much more annoying to be called than “fascist”. We need an unjustifiably smug sounding pejorative for people who call everyone tankies, to call them in exchange so that they can see how not epic their insult is.
The key thing is that the insult needs to seem like you think it’s really badass and brave of you to call them that, and it should seem like you think they’re seething at you, when in reality it’s a super lame insult. Like so:
“You’re a tankie”
“Oh no the Tankie-twister has arrived!”
“Wtf kind of lame insult is that lol”
“Now you know how everyone else feels about being called tankies”
I am pretty sure 90% of people who get called tankies on Lemmy are not communists
It’s funny, because the term was coined back in the 1950s to describe British progressives who opposed NATO intervention in Eastern Europe.
If anti-interventionism is what passes the bar for Communism, I suspect Lemmy might be flush with the little red bastards.
Does the person deny the human rights violation of USSR and China? Then they’re tankies. Simple as that.
We need an unjustifiably smug sounding pejorative for people who call everyone tankies, to call them in exchange so that they can see how not epic their insult is.
A lot of people dont deserve a reply. Works great for me. I’m sure thats been me many times in the past. (And future)
The reciprocal word I’ve typically seen is “liberal”.
That’s just tossing a hand grenade into any political discourse.
Would companies make it cheaper or would they keep the price and pocket the profit?
They can’t, if you have a functioning market economy. There should be competition and renewables, due to their more decentralized nature even incite competition.
You seem to assume that mergers and acquisitions are not an essential part of a market economy. Left to their own devices, capitalists will always end up trying to form monopolies. You need a strong regulatory state to keep them in check. But then because they are inexorably pulled towards maximizing profitability, they will try to capture the state and deregulate. So, unless you go to a very aggressively anticapitalist set of policies a market economy will never be “functioning” for long.
I don’t assume that, and I won’t argue for an entirely free market. I also agree with your observation that accumulation happens, however we might have different views on how long that actually takes. Atm the shift to renewables is disrupting the accumulation we already have in the energy sector, because it requires very little capital to build your own little solar powerplant compared to a fossil or nuclear powerplant (or large hydro, btw.). Same thing for battery storage units. So with renewables, there’s more potential for competition.
That might change again in the future through continued accumulation and shitty policies, but my point is: as long as we don’t have either monopolies or cartels and thusly competition in the market still exists, even large corporations can’t simply dictate prices to increase their margins.
Maybe it would also be much cheaper if “your” houses were a bit smaller and had proper insulation…
I think it would cost trillions of dollars to rebuild all houses to be smaller. Imagine the carbon footprint of that endeavor.
I wish!! Unfortunately, I didn’t build my house.
Have you considered inventing a time machine, going back in time, becoming a general contractor, and then building your house but smaller? Smh, people won’t go the slightest bit out of their way to make things better these days.
Not sure if you’re referring to USA, but the energy code in the US is quite strict. Since the 80s insulation has been required and in the last 20 years the code has tightened to be quite strict. Homes in Latin America have none, no energy code, and European housing stock predates these requirements. Doesn’t mean US homes don’t consume a ton of energy but they are probably way better insulated than average.
Both Europe and US are big enough to have a huge variety in building codes for different climates in different states/countries.
Its not all about insulation though. A terrace has much less exterior wall than a row of spread out detached homes. Some still insulate the party wall. but more for sound reasons. But the main advantage of terraces , fossil fuel-wise, is that the medium-density is more likely to give you a walkable grocery + other stuff and a somewhat useful bus service or other public transport.
Though modern suburbs here can be pretty sparse too with more detached homes.
Imagine the savings to society with the energy independence from green energy
- shut down most of the continent wide natural gas distribution infrastructure
- shut down most of the continent wide gasoline distribution infrastructure
- cut way back on the military when we no longer have to protect oil kingdoms
I know your intentions are good, but this reads as a rather damning list of why a bunch of people are going to fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
Nuclear is also a good option. It has the potential to scale up to our generation needs faster than green energy, and it can still be environmentally clean when any byproduct is handled responsibly.
Do I trust my government (USA) to enforce proper procedure and handling? Not really… but I do think we’re less likely to have a nuclear accident in the present day. Modern designs have many more fail safes. And I think it’d still be much cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
I think they need to coexist, though. I think a goal in the far-future should be a decentralized grid with renewable energy sources integrated wherever they can be.
Basically the one nation I would have most trusted to handle nuclear safely, Japan, couldn’t even do it. The issue these days is not that the plants themselves are unsafe, it’s that we live on a active and changing planet, and accidents can and will always happen because of so-called acts of God. The problem is that nuclear, when it goes bad, tends to go mega ultra bad in ways that are very environmentally destructive and heinously expensive to clean up. So even if there is only 1/10000 the accident rate at nuclear plants that there are at other power plants, the consequences can be a million times worse.
Would you feel better about nuclear if we expanded these rebreeder reactors I’ve heard of (uses spent nuclear waate) to the point there is no spent fuel sitting around?
Why is your model for nuclear Japan? China is the world’s forefront of nuclear energy research and development, keeps expanding its capabilities, and has a clean record with no accidents.
Regardless, you’re overestimating the damage that nuclear has done in comparison with other energy sources. You could have one Chernobyl per year and you wouldn’t come close to the death toll coal or oil have worldwide. Regarding Fukushima for example, since you brought up Japan: some recent studies suggest that more people have died as a consequence of the upending of their lived by the evacuation of the whole region, than would have died according to realistic statistical models of radiation damage to humans. The main problem is that fossil fuel lobbies have successfully made people completely intolerant of radiation damage while they happily live in cities breathing in NO2 and particulate matter without one complaint.
thorium is nuclear too… (and doesnt seem to have the same runaway problems!)
Humans would never cheap out on health and safety, or reduce regulatory red tape just to try to bring costs (and maybe, though less likely, prices) down. Unheard of.
Also you can vastly reduce the amount of battery capacity needed by having pilotable sources of energy like nuclear, hydro, geothermy and such
Except nuclear is not very pilotable. More than Solar or Wind. But can’t really be turned off either
Thankfully that is going to happen anyway through simple economics. Fossil fuel extraction is functionally already a peak technology, out of which every bit of efficiency has been squeezed by over 100 years of frantic and lavishly funded scientific development, whereas solar, battery, and wind technologies have been absolutely plunging in $-per-Kw to deploy and have much much further to go. So governments can try to slow this down as much as they wish, but it’s as much a fool’s errand as trying to rescue the horse industry in about 1920.
Now as for the question of “why isn’t this more efficient technology resulting in savings for, me, the consumer?” I can only encourage you to look at the entire history of extractive, investor-driven capitalism for the answer.
If “our” means on the US, you may have to take a look at your electricity monopolies for it to make any difference.
No they wouldn’t. Final consumer cost is based on what people WILL pay not what they WANT to pay. At the end of the day the overarching goal of capitalism is for 99% of the population to spend 100% of their earnings. You can’t funnel all wealth to the 1% if the 99% are holding on to it.
Yes. BUT there are certain ways a government can help its citizens (and itself in most cases) by allowing them to be self sufficient that has nothing to do with electric companies or monopolies at all. The subsidies for solar panels were a great example of this. Depending on your personal needs, you could generate enough power to take yourself off the grid, and the government invested in your panels by way of those subsidies. In many cases the extra electricity from the panels that you don’t use can go back into a grid to be used by someone else. Theoretically helping you and the government. There are, of course some issues with the system but speaking from experience it can absolutely work and work wonderfully.
Unfortunately Trump (of course) has killed these subsidies so that will not be a thing as of new years 2026.
So you’re telling me if I found a way reach all my fellow power company customers we could strike and lower our power rates?
The main problem with that is the large power consumption by industry. This is ensuring continued profits for the company and thereby weakens your influence, similar to hiring scabs.
This is sounding like you’re trying to do a socialism over here.
Sounds like you don’t understand what socialism is
Many states have very regulated utility prices: you may need just a half dozen buddies and get appointed to the oversight board that approves rates
This guy politics.
Yes. It’s like big telecom. When people install panels at home, power companies start inventing additional fees. If communities start looking for local grids, companies start lobbying to outlaw this.
In a free market, people will pay less for the same service if they can.
Capitalistic utility monopolies are a scam.
Don’t even have to invest. In my area, a 100% renewable supplier was about 30% more per KWH, all of that extra overhead was paid to keep old unprofitable coal plants online. That’s capitalist efficiency for you.
A reminder that https://slrpnk.net/c/memes exists. I’m crossposting this there, as it’s totally on point. The stupid ‘!’ thing wasn’t working for me.
Didn’t auto-complete for me either, but: !memes@slrpnk.net
But the fossil fuel billionaires are bribing them now. What’s the point of creating solar and wind billionaires in ten years time? Who knows who will be in power and collecting their bribes then.
This is really a huge oversimplification of a complex and nuanced topic. But the main thing worth mentioning is that your utility bills, in all likelihood, are already insanely cheap if you compare what you get to any other time in history. Like, keeping your home temperature at a perfectly pleasant temperature 24 hours per day probably costs you only a couple hours of labor each month. Compare this to gathering sticks in the forest and lighting a fire inside a mud hut - which, btw, also gives you lung cancer faster than cigarettes.
Should the government invest more in renewables? Yes, obviously. They should also fund the infrastructure necessary to make renewables work at scale, and research to improve renewable generation, transmission, and storage tech in order to close the gap between what is practical now and what we need to achieve. And while they are at it, they should introduce improved pricing schemes to head off increased wasteful usage. But will any of this actually have a direct impact on consumer pricing…? Probably not, since almost all utilities are already state owned or else heavily regulated. The cost of electricity is determined more by committee and political maneuvering than the actual price of, say, coal or solar on a day to day basis. The actual mechanism of paying for power to be generated and delivered to your house on demand is a combination of the price you pay per kwh, property taxes, government revenue in general, debt taken on by the government or utility, investments made in the past, etc. If you actually want a cheaper price per kwh, the solution is simply petitioning whatever regulatory body is in charge to lower it.
Of course, the problem with lower prices is that they encourage wasteful usage. If electricity becomes free, then aunt Ethel will start blasting the AC while leaving the windows open, because she likes to be comfortable while listening to the birds chirp. Without appropriate pricing schemes, people and companies will use up as much additional renewable capacity as is built as soon as you finish building it.
My heating bills runs close to $800 a month in the Winter. That is more than a few hours of labor.
Hence why I said “in all likelihood”. There are always exceptions to the rule. Apparently you are one of them.
The average for the whole US during the winter is just under $1,000. That is around $250 a month. This is also not a “few” hours.
Central air can easily run +$200 a month during the summer.
I will admit I have a big house that is heated with diesel. My bill would be half that if I had a heat pump.
Considering most Americans were living paycheck to paycheck before this recent bout of inflation, I don’t think most have any extra money to play around with anymore. It is time for tough decisions like keeping the house warm or eating things other than ramen.
