Yes folks, its cheaper to heat with electricity!

[Owain]

The vegetarian society would disagree with you, of course. Anyway, the simple way is to use some of your veggies to feed livestock, which subsequently feed you (and manure the ground so you can grow more veggies). I think it takes a couple of acres before a cow is feasable though, or two if you want year round milk.

A pig is more realistic, or if you have a reliable and cheap energy supply for the aerator pumps, a small trout farm tank doesn't take up much room.

Even less work is to shoot wild things that fly overhead.

Owain

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think thats all back to front.

The french connection was never a one way street, it was initially a load balancer: if it is these days largely one way, that was not its design intention.

For large undersea power cables the point at which its cheaper to build your own nuclear station rather than the cable (fully utilised - a state that never happens with windpower bar once a year on the 13th of march with the sun in scorpio)is not that far..indeed for long undersea intercontinetal cables its simply not worth it at all, ever. Someone has to pay a subsidy to make it work. Ergo the burden ultimately falls on the consumer. Its more expensive than it need e simply because of silly ideological windmills.

[Doctor Drivel]

Exactly! Thatcher.

[Doctor Drivel]

This sycophant plantpot is real nutball. Scargill did not dictate policy, he was doing what his job description dictated - preserving the interests of his members. He was right. He predicted the closure of most of the coal in industry for political spite. He was laughed at and it came true. They had to fight faced with an obsessed slag, as they had no alternative and nothing to lose.

[Doctor Drivel]

Scargill never closed down the viable mines. Scargill never squandered North Sea gas reserves for political spite. This political stupidity we are now facing the consequences of in that we are having to import gas from abroad and be open to external pressures. The gas price hypes being all too clear.

The Slagette also squandered the greatest legacy this country had seen, North Sea oil. It came on line in big way when she got to power. The slagette had half-baked economic policies that failed creating massive unemployment. She propped this up in benefits from the oil. The oil was not used for anything positive or investment for the future - as was the case with gas, needlessly using it for power production over coal. No investment in education, updating of industry, no nothing. Just a whole generation wasted away on benefits - today's long term unemployed are a legacy of Thatcher the Slagette. We are still paying the price of her in a big way in a level of long term unemployed and high energy prices.

Only half-wit sycophants support that silly anachronistic party, run by class obsessed fools.

[Doctor Drivel]

Er not true. The Severn and Mersey barriers are predicted to produce 6% of the UKs power.

[Doctor Drivel]

A barrier right across the mouth of the Thames will not work as a flood defence as the land either side is too low, meaning the water will run around the barrier.

London should be written off as a capital and development stopped. It is going the way of New Orleans. It is not if, it is when. Liverpool has been suggested as a new capital - the redundant docks make a great location for a parliament. The locals don't want them there. They said they would drive them out!

[Doctor Drivel]

The third highest tidal range in the world, the Mersey is the 4th.

[Steve Firth]

True, only half-wits support Labour.

[Steve Firth]

Force them to eat their own words.

[dennis]

No he wasn't. He made a declaration that he and his union were going to get the government out and decide who was going to run the country. It was at this point that he set the industry on a path to destruction.

Well Scargill made it happen, so him predicting it just proves it was done deliberately by him.

Try listening to some of the cr@p he was saying at the time and then you may understand.

>

[dennis]

The miners union tried to get rid of the elected government instead of looking after miners interests. The government decided that the miners were too powerful and took steps to diversify the generating industry so it didn't rely on coal. Once it had happened less coal was needed and pits closed. If Scargill had not tried to topple the elected government and had stuck to looking after the miners the power generation would probably still be coal.

If oil gets much more expensive they can reopen the pits and get some cheap Eastern European miners in.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Not sure the technology had failed - or even been given the chance to work through development.

The dash to gas was because we owned a large quantity which at the time was infinite in political terms. That it was wasted on electricity generation when we had alternative energy for this means the crunch has merely come that much sooner. Not that Thatcher cares about that, though. Or anything else she wrecked.

[dennis]

And what produces that 6% for the other 18 hours a day? This is never answered by the supporters of the barrier AFAICS so I don't expect you to answer either.

[Andy Hall]

Possibly. Have you discussed this with Boris?

Mmm.... So let's see. World financial centres. Noo Yoik, Tokyo, Frankfurt, 'pool. Somehow the don't fit together

[Doctor Drivel]

Snip total and utter drivel from a sycophantic plantpot. This fool will cut off his own nose to spite his face. A Daily Mail reader to the core. Sad isn't it. Very sad.

[Dan Sheppard]

Oh, you may well be right about that. But for a while I used to have the major daily grid loads in my daily RSS to-read feed, and I've never actually seen power travelling in the other direction!

About the same, acutally, on recent evidence (eg Basslink). An HVDC link can be less if well managed, but I guess you could say the same about building a nuclear plant. But with real world values of incompetence you'd get about 300MW for a billion quid. Of course with the latter you're actually genuinely increasing capacity, but you also have to add the (much higher) costs of running it.

Depends what you mean by long! There seem to be a lot of studies which support the economics on the scale of the channel/baltic sort of distances. But across the Atlantic, sure.

Dan.

[Doctor Drivel]

Purely political. To get rid of the coal industry, which primarily fed power stations, Thatcher allowed the gas reserves to be used for power generation - the Dash for Gas, as it was called. She made sure it was cheaper to eliminate coal usage and bury the coal industry. Purely political spite. She could afford to pay the dole by squandering North Sea Oil revenues. North Sea Oil was not used for anything positive or investment in the future as the Norwegians did.

We are now feeling the consequences of her acts by the hypes in gas and electricity prices. We have no control of these as gas is imported. Gas should have been reserved primarily for domestic use, as the expert economists advised, and coal used for power generation, using advanced scrubbers. All they had to do was have decent deals and relations with the mining industry. Instead the Tory hatred of miners came to the fore - Churchill sent troops with mounted bayonets to quell miners.

[Doctor Drivel]

Thatcher made sire it was.

Overall it wasn't when taking into account social benefits for 100.000s of people. Then the crime the unemployment created too, etc, etc.

[Doctor Drivel]