Nothing will change until lots of people die (not just from the effects of such, but also things like "the boomer generation fuck off"), and/or the billionaires get hit in the wallet.

Same old story.

As someone who just had FTTP (yep, to the premises) installed in their rural home, the way they did it was thus:

- They went to the local cabinet (which is already fibre-backed to the local exchange many km's away), strung a fibre out of it.
- They got up the telegraph pole in my streets, strung a new fibre off it.
- They used the old copper line that's been there since the 60's to slide the new fibre reel down.
- They put a second hook on my eaves, and hooked the fibre from there, and then wired the fibre direct into my house.
- They didn't remove a damn thing.

Took about 20 minutes, judging by the CCTV.

It would take about the same time just to pull down the copper from my house safely (the above did not require closing or working in the road, for instance), then isolating that from the dozens of others in the road on the pole, then removing that all the way back to the cabinet. Which I know goes underground because when I first moved in a few years ago, the BT guy had to remove that cable from, basically, a huge puddle which was cutting my DSL speed from 75Mbps to 20Mbps (DSL is amazing, though, that it still worked!).

Until everything's fibre, you can't remove those old lines, it's just not practical. And then are you really going to mobilise a bunch of people to remove a small run of copper from every street?

I once did some maths and the IT at the school I work in has something like tens of thousands of km+ of copper wiring that's unused. One room can have 30+ runs of nearly-100m. That's 3km for one room, from where a building was previously wired to have an IT suite, but then changed purpose, etc. We could, in theory, take that pure-copper cable out and recycle it. That one school likely has more copper in it than my entire village.

The fact is that it's just not worth the effort. There are huge thick bundles of it, and while it wouldn't take that long to pull it all out (much easier than putting it in because you can largely just cut and pull the entire bundle), it's not worth doing so in terms of the cost of the raw copper. We know that because honestly much of the time, rather than re-use the old copper runs which we know to be Cat5e, we just run a new Cat6a run alongside them if we do need to wire something. And Cat5e has far more metal in it than old telephone line.

I cut something like 200 cables this summer alone. And I mean I cut the last 2 metres of them because they were in my way in the cabinets. The actual RUN of cable is still in the walls and going all over the building, 50, 60, 70m runs all over the place.

I bet that a single office or school demolition recovers more copper (and steel and other stuff) than an entire village of old telephone lines, and while it may be a factor on the demolition companies finances, it's not a huge one. Scrap metal, which you have to de-sheath, transport, etc. isn't as valuable as people make out. It's why nobody arranges a regular scrap-metal collection at my local council to come and just grab anything of value that they could. No. They do that for paper. They don't do it for metal unless you arrange it with them. There's not much money in it. The only people making money are the guys lobbing some bits of lead, steel and alumium on the back of their van until they have enough to get a couple-of-hundred-quid free personal backhander as part of their work when it's all been moved at the expense of their company's fuel expense account.

Yeah, all you need is 200 years for them to book enough appointments to actually pull the stuff down, and you're golden! (or at least, copper-coloured).

Like an online bookseller turning into a global retail warehouse then renting out their datacenter services, producing talking home assistants, and launching rockets into space?

It has happened under both.

Yes, but the study seems to be comparing two groups where there is no reason to think anything else changed. The British diet didn't change in other ways after 1953, the only real difference was that sugar rationing had ended. At least, that would be the claim.

Nostalgia is all very well, but it was not a very healthy diet, lots of white bread, margarine, overcooked and limited number of vegetables. It was eaten in a more disciplined way - before or after 1953 children would not go to the larder or fridge and help themselves. Meals were eaten at mealtimes, with minimal snacking.

There are not very many people alive now who remember those days, but if you can find one and talk to them you get a picture of life which makes it plausible that the change in sugar rationing was a key variable. Other things mentioned, like activity, yes they were very different from now, but they did not change much in 1953, whereas sugar did.

As always no numbers, and argument on an engineering topic which is at the level of literary criticism.

to make the case you need to take a specific system where there is data available, and show that your argument applies there.

The most accessible in a few clicks is the UK. Go to www.gridwatch.co.uk for graphics. If you want the csv data free get it from www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk. Do the work and you will see that in winter there is peak demand of a bit under 50GW and that solar is basically non-existent from about 22GW faceplate. A function mainly of latitude with a contribution from weather. You will also see that there are in most winters periods of a week or ten days when wind generates less than 3GW from faceplate installed base of about 32GW. So what we have here is peak demand with peak low output from wind and solar.

In summer on the other hand you have peak solar and long days, but summer is not when you get peak demand.

What's the result of all this? Its that if you want to supply 50GW peak you have to have more than 50GW gas generation. But having it, you then only use it for part of the time, because part of the time you have wind and solar peaking. Something else also happens, at peak production, which does not coincide with peak demand and often in summer coincides with low demand, you have to turn off the wind.

The UK, if government plans work out, is going to end up with around 200GW of generating capacity to supply about 60GW of peak demand. And in operational terms, its constructing huge amounts of generating capacity off the north coast of Scotland or similar inhospitable places distant from demand. Then it constructs hugely expensive transmission links to bring this generated power to where its needed. It also builds gas to cover calms and nights.

So the result is, it pays people to install wind, then it pays them not to generate from it. Then it pays others to install gas and generate from it in the timesa when the guys its paying not to generate comply and turn off. The result of this is the highest electricity prices in the industrialized countries - and no, I am not spoon feeding you numbers, llook it up for yourself!. And it is only getting worse. The more wind they install, the more they have to pay to turn off, and however much wind they install the lows are still going to need gas to cover. The same thing applies to solar. It doesn't matter how much you install, at 5pm on a January evening, its going to be producing zero.

What you can see from the UK is that the attempt to move to 'renewables' is an attempt to do the impossible. Its trying to run a country's electricity supply with technologies that are guaranteed to have peaks of production which coincide with lows of demand, and lows of production that coincide with peaks of demand. It is not working, and as the proportion of wind and solar rises its going to get worse.

All this is happening with the background of the program to move to EVs and heat pumps. And they also have the fantasy of a huge data center industry. Right, with expensive and unreliable electricity? Because they have also just empowered the network operator to do rolling blackouts, which they call 'demand management'.

This is what happens when you have people with degrees in literature or media studies or some kind of vague social subjects enthusiastically trying to run the power generation for an industrial economy, and having no idea how to plan and no concept of engineering. They just keep saying that the wind and sun are free - as if that had any bearing. And they keep applauding whenever wind and solar reach a peak of a day or a week or month, not seeing that that is part of the problem and not part of any solution.

Get some numbers and do some work. And read the Royal Society's report on electricity storage, which blows the idea that batteries are the answer into the air.

You would expect the same thing with tournament chess players who spend hours working hard at trying to calculate and visualize move possibilities. The process has something in common with navigation. It does involve pattern recognition also, but there is a strong element of navigation.

An interesting comparison would be with tournament bridge players who calculate but probably don't visualize in the same way. (Can't say for sure as I have only played bridge a few times, years ago.)

The hypothesis would be that spatial navigation effort safeguards, and the prediction would be that chess players will have lower rates of Alzheimers than bridge players.

I'm a citizen of a democracy, and vote on energy policy and the directors of it both locally and nationally and am in that role fully entitled to opinions on both. With or without a PhD.

And when I look at the data of wind generation in the UK what I see is blackouts coming towards the country. I do not see, and you do not explain, how a couple of GW of wind power generation during a calm is going to supply 10s of GW of demand. I do not see any plans in the UK for any measures that will fill the gap.

I am not alone. From the UK Telegraph today:
_________________________
Measures that came into effect this week give the National Energy System Operator (Neso) the authority to tackle electricity shortages with rolling power cuts around the country.
Each area would have its power switched off for three hours at a time. Neso would have to give just eight hoursâ(TM) notice to use the so-called demand control rotation protocol.
The new measures, first reported by The Guardian, are designed to bridge a gap between Nesoâ(TM)s current emergency powers and rolling-blackout plans that require government approval.
Currently, the UKâ(TM)s electricity supply emergency code, a national plan of energy rationing, can only be triggered by ministers and requires emergency legislation.
It is intended for prolonged national crises lasting more than 24 hours.
Neso, meanwhile, has the ability to disconnect up to 20pc of power at five minutesâ(TM) notice in the face of imminent system collapse, such as the nationwide shutdown seen in Spain in 2025.
Under the updated rules, Neso can activate rolling local blackouts without political approval.
___________________________

I was saying this 20+ years ago when I was studying AI and its history back then, long before LLMs existed.

This post is not flamebait. Its sincerely held rational opinions based on the facts of the UK experience, backed up by the data readily available from gridwatch or gridwatch.templar, I understand that people would like desperately for wind to be a viable technology for industrial societies, but the verdict is coming in from the gigantic experiment, and it just isn't.

What dooms it is intermittency. Well, and high costs too.

Just look at the results of the latest UK wind auctions, and look at the estimates for building transmission capacity from the north coast of Scotland (where the turbines are) to the Midlands and South where demand is. Look at constraint payments. Look at gridwatch to see what all this is delivering. Read the Royal Society report to see what the best UK minds can come up with regarding storage.

It isn't working and it isn't going to work. Folks, you need to get out of denial and look at the facts of experience!

If they are trying to run the country on wind and solar, then on a winter evening when there is the usual blocking high and wind calm, and no solar generation, your UK friends will be trying to supply 45GW (or north of 60GW if they manage to convert everyone to EVs and heat pumps) while having only about 10GW generation. Assuming they manage to get around 100GW of wind installed, which is a real question also.

Don't believe me? Look at gridwatch. Lows from 30GW face plate wind can go as low as 0.5GW. Can be below 5GW for a week or ten days at a time.

And this is going to continue for a week or ten days, as it does almost every winter.

By day two they will not be discussing the difference between stocks and flows. They'll be discussing

"CCGT capacity in the UK is sufficient to cover the rare times when there is zero wind."

No, it isn't. Just look at gridwatch. zero wind (or close to zero) is not a rare occurrence at all.

As to enough gas, the UK has about 30-35GW of gas depending exactly how you count. Peak UK demand is around 45GW.

The UK has twice this year been on the verge of blackouts. The last one, in June, it escaped by the skin of its teeth by importing on an urgent basis from France.

Need to read the UK news. Its impossible to run a country on intermittent generation technology. Its especially impossible to do so while raising demand by moving transport and heating to electricity, and while making no or inadequate provision to cover intermittency.

The question is, what is the value of wind generated power?

The UK has real time and archived data available to anyone who really wants to answer this question. The data shows, in summary, that wind generated power is not the same as conventional or nuclear generated power. You can see it clearly here in graphical form ( and from other sources, (www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk for instance) there's the raw data available in csv format. Here's the graphical version:

www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind

What happens is that much of the time peak wind generation coincides with low demand. This leads to constraint payments, when operators are paid as if they were generating but have to turn off supply. Then, there are regular calms, several a year, lasting a week or so, when peak demand coincides with low generation. When this happens gas has to be turned up to cover. The effect of these two factors is to lower capacity factor. It doesn't appear in the usual accounts of this, and it is never reckoned with in LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) calculations. LCOE is basically accounting fraud, comparable to stuffing the channel in manufacturing. It assumes that all power generated across the life of an installation is of equal value, but it is not.

How low is low generation? As you can see from gridwatch, 30GW faceplate of wind can fall well below 1GW for quite long periods.

This is not primarily about climate. Whether you think there is a climate crisis or not, the problem is that this is not a technology that is fit for the purpose of supplying a reliable electricity system to a modern industrial economy. The problem is there is no cost effective way of dealing with intermittency. In fact, without having total backup for the wind, there is no way at all.

The way to think about this is that what is being done with wind at the moment is not a transition. What is really happening is that a functioning conventional or nuclear system is required to pretty much fully cover peak demand. The buildout of wind is basically supplementing it. The case, if there is one, for doing this is not that a cheaper method of generation will replace conventional. Its that when the wind works and coincides with demand it can reduce fuel consumption of the primary generation network.

A further problem which the UK is experiencing is that wind power locations are far removed from demand centers. So they are having to build at great expense large transmission facilities from the north coast of Scotland - for which there is no other reason than the fact that wind farms have been built there.

Does it in fact do this? Is it cost effective to build (in the case of the UK) all those turbines off the north coast of Scotland, and all that transmission to get the power down to the Midlands and South, in order to save some fuel on your main conventional network?

I have seen it claimed, but have never seen any fully costed case showing that it is. And the fuel savings themselves? Maybe a lot less than you would expect, because to accommodate the wind power fluctuations you have to have rapid start gas, which is very fuel inefficient.

Some reading this will say 'batteries'. The Royal Society considered this, and dismissed it as absurdly expensive. It was so expensive and impractical that they thought a better solution would be to excavate and seal vast caverns and fill them with stored hydrogen. They did not specify where this was to come from. The fact that they thought this a more practical solution speaks volumes about the scale of the problem. The report goes into the question of intermittency in some depth, and draws attention of the observational fact that whole seasons can be low wind.

https://royalsociety.org/-/med...

What happens if you close your eyes and go ahead anyway with trying to transition to wind? The UK is finding out. Its had two cases this year of approaching large scale blackouts because of insufficient reserve to cover fluctuations. So far its been lucky, and there is some evidence that the narrowness of the escape was covered up. But the smart money is that one of these winters luck will run out, and they will then have to cold star at scalet and, if they have had to retire their gas by then, insufficient spinning reserve. And no, you will not get spinning reserve over the Euro interconnects, they don't do that.

There may be alternative technologies which will generate the levels of reliable power our economies need. But wind is not one of them. So on the whole the Administration is right. Its expensive to cancel it, but its a lot cheaper than going ahead with it. The UK is an early warning system. Its the canary. Or if you like, its like a bystander watching the lemmings and figuring out he does not want to join in this particular rush.

AI is, and always has been, exclusively nothing but exponentially-increasing requirements for logarithmically-plateauing results.

Any mathematician will tell you what that means in the end.