Will the declared objectives of Insualte Britain soon be seen as relevant?

[Starmill]

So would fixing the energy system so that energy is not ludicrously expensive.
And that has many more indirect benefits than just somewhat reducing bills for space heating.

Why would we build a system that's designed to use more energy than we need to use, and just make it cheaper when we can afford to make a one off capital investment which will reduce energy demand for the lifetime of a house? You're just saying we could do, which is true, but why should we?

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 6 Feb 2022 ==

This isn't really true.
They are a prerequisite if you wish to adopt heat pumps within the current energy system model of expensive electricity - which is derived from government policy and the energy market structure they have imposed.

Heat pumps are an effective solution in this country for medium and large sized properties. District heat will be more efficient for denser housing such as terraces or towers.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 6 Feb 2022 ==

Also the primary reason insulation is deemed to be required for heat pumps is because electricity is ruinously expensive and thus to keep heating bills comparable to current ones dramatic increases in insulation are required. This is not inherent to the technology but merely the interaction between the technology and the wider energy system.

A part of it is inherent to the technology, because the use of a heat pump is efficient when it's on for a long period of time where it is heating up air inside the property rather more slowly than with water heated by a gas boiler. The capability of a heat pump to warm a building quickly from low temperatures is lower than with fossil fuels, obviously.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 6 Feb 2022 ==

The sooner we do things about climate change the sooner we reap the benefits, it does not mean that any particular programme this is true for is unique in this regard!

That's true. However the CCC have laid out the full reasoning behind the recommendations in the document to which I've linked. You've said that this is difficult to achieve, I was pointing out that that's not a reason to say it's the wrong approach

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 6 Feb 2022 ==

If we replaced all energy use in the UK with electricity, using resitive heating, you would need something like 210GWe of nuclear or 360GWe of offshore wind, or some combination of the two (in proportion obviously). About twenty percent of that is consumed making synthetic aviation fuel, and I will leave whether that is a good idea as an exercise for the reader. This sort of thing and the industrial mobilisation implications of it is the meat of my current research, and I will have a publication out on it this year I hope.[EDIT: Worth noting that even if we used district heat for all low temperature heat demands in the economy, including space heating, hot water etc, the nuclear figure only falls to about 150GW]


Including the supply chain, building Hinkley Point C is taking ~22,000 staff, which impliest hat a reference workforce approaching half a million staff, even ignoring any mass production benefits, could build something like 23 HInkley Point Cs simultaneously, for around 74GW building at any given time.
Hornsea 2 is expected to produce 2,000 construction jobs for 1.4GW nameplate, implying something like ~350GWe under construction at once! That ignores much of the supply chain but I hope the point is clear.

Half a million workers is an enormous quantity, and once you abandon commitment to an existing energy system model of precious expensive energy,

It's admirable of you to go to such a trouble to write all of this out but I don't even know where to begin. Upgrades to housing stock occur once and last for the lifetime of the assets. Energy once generated is used once and then gone. In particular it's inexcusable not to adopt a full upgrade approach to the country's social housing, where oversight is already with the public sector.

 

[Gostav]

If the IB continues to block roads, they may find that the biggest trouble is not the police or prisons, but violent clashes with ordinary people.

https://twitter.com/DanniPilger/status/1490588287857213446

Video shows how angry people fight with Essen Retten - Leben Retten* activists.

https://twitter.com/AufstandLastGen/status/1490672993051328522

And with angry workers.

These activists have clearly gone off course because they can always blame the police and the government if the police use violent to deportation against and arrest them, but when they start blaming public, those activists wound find they cannot take the moral high ground so much.

*Essen Retten - Leben Retten: English means "Save food - save lives" a German group who block roads until political act for save foods.