For nuclear fans...

[The Natural Philosopher]

Somethi9ng is definitely going on at the hidden end of politics.

Has Osborne et al finally realised that greenspin is OK for votes, but a country with no electricity doesn't wash so well?

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , The Natural Philosopher escribió:

Yes.

Now they're in power for another five years, someone has suddenly realised that having the lights go off this winter is not exactly going to endear govt to the populace.

[Brian Reay]

I've no issue with building nuclear power stations but using French companies and Chinese money seems as daft was relying on gas coming from Russia.

The politicians have listened to the tree huggers for far too long, it is time to totally ignore them. We need a proper energy policy, not some stupid plan based on windmills which need to be taken off line when the wind blows.

[Tim Streater]

Which we are not, in fact, doing.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Tim Streater escribió:

Which of those are we not doing? All three statements are true as far as I'm aware.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Which fuel would you use which is totally under our control?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Which socialists would that be? They were in a poor state before WW2 and that didn't do them any favours...

Do you ever use railways?

[harry]

Most of our foreign gas comes from the ME by tanker. Landed at Milford Haven

Home produced gas.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Cars etc took over until congestion in many places made them just an alternative. Railways generally offer a more predictable journey time - and without the problem of parking.

May be obvious - but it's why they've had somewhat of a renaissance in recent years.

[Tim Streater]

Hence the overcrowding on trains that Mike T was whinging about. And you can't fix that in five minutes by lengthening platforms, adding coaches to trains, running more trains, or adding new lines. And you couldn't do it out of the profits of the railway companies either.

Laying new lines (or adding any infrastructure to this country) is also hard because the UK is overcrowded and every bit of land is used for something or other. And that same overcrowding brings us back to the congestion you refer to above.

[dennis]

wasn't that because they were under government control during WW1?

[dennis]

Yes, lack of investment in roads, causing a lot of pollution too.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Tim Streater escribió:

Sorry you think I was whinging. You're probably a Southerner, and the south east gets proportionally far more investment than the rest of the country combined. The SE also gets the newest rail carriages while the rest of the ancient rolling stock is given a lick of paint and shunted off to operators in less deserving parts of the country.

No, actually, it's because we are still trying to cope with the Victorian legacy of railways (we invented, them remember, the first passenger railway in the world being the Liverpool-Manchester line).

We have a heritage of low bridges, narrow-bore tunnels, etc. which have made upgrading to modern standards prohibitively expensive. Other countries have been able to build modern systems from the word go.

FUs set.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Extending the platforms to take longer trains did help here. Of course it can be a hole in the bucket thing - the better the service the more that use it.

Pretty no major railway investment in recent years has come from company profits.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , harry escribió:

Still a f****it, I see, Harry. I'm not a socialist, I'm a realist. But don't let that deter you from your paranoid fantasies.

[tony sayer]

In article , Dave Plowman (News) scribeth thus

Yes, even more so since I Got my Senior Railcard:-)

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , tony sayer escribió:

I say yes. Despite what you think of BT, they have brought the UK's antiquated phone system into the 21st century. They need to be prodded from time to time to meet their obligations, though (like rural broadband) but generally that does seem to happen.

I'm a bit more ambivalent about that. Price competition sort-of works but at the cost of huge bureaucracy and the consumer having to deal with all this switching bollocks.

The privatised power companies are also reluctant to reinvest into the infrastructure, with the result that the taxpayer is going to have to guarantee the building of Hinkley Point C to the tune of £20 billion, and the consumer is going to have to fit the bill for the contract agreed with EdF where the wholesale price of power coming out of HPC is twice the current wholesale price.

And there's all the silly shenanigans with solar and the FIT tariff, which means those without solar are subdidising those that have it, and the green subsidies. These seem to be coming to an end, though.

[Chris Hogg]

Hinkley C will be small potatoes compared to the cost of more than doubling the amount of power generated in the UK and upgrading the transmission grid accordingly, when electric vehicles become popular and widely used by the green believers.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Chris Hogg escribió:

Indeed. Tell the greenies that their so-called "clean" vehicles merely transfer the source of pollution from the petrol tank to the power stations that have to generate the electricity to fuel their Piouses and Leafs and watch them fall silent.

Then tell them we will have to build several more new power stations at huge expense to the taxpayer to charge all those electric vehicles when they become popular, in order to avoid the lights going out and watch the reaction.

And what about the cost (finanical and environmental) of making and recycling all those batteries, which contain some pretty nasty chemicals, and cost serious money and need significant amounts of energy, to reprocess?

These hypocritical greenies make me sick. They criticise anything and everything from the comfort of their organic Tibetan yak-wool-stuffed armchairs and yet when challenged come up with no practical solutions other than a few million more frigging wind turbines which isn't gonna charge their crappy little electro-cars when the wind ain't blowing.

[Chris Hogg]

More than several!

Government estimates of fuel usage for road transport in 2014 was

40Mtoe (million tonnes oil equivalent), and scroll down to p.5), equal to 465200GWh )

Annual electricity consumption at present is 306600GWh (assuming average UK power consumption is ~35GW, from Gridwatch). Present generating capacity struggles to keep up with existing demand.

So UK power generation would have to be increased by a factor of 2.5, (465200+306600/306600) i.e. we would need two and a half times more power stations than we have now.

But I agree with Rod Speed; it'll never happen, at least not to any degree. If people want to use electric cars, they should be compelled to provide the means for recharging them, much like Harry does but independent of the national grid.