I’m a Brit, so I know about business rates. They don’t come anywhere close to covering the costs of a big build out of our electricity infra!

Just as a specific concrete example of what I’ve said about the distinction between costs and prices, look at Chile as well as California. Very high renewables penetration, total system costs haven’t risen, but where the money is spent has of course shifted.

Those two things are not the same thing. One way they could shoulder a portion of their costs would be to do on-site power generation, but they’ll still want grid connectivity etc and so should still pay in for that.

Distribution and storage are certainly important costs. But I’m not suggesting we only ask AI DC builders to pay for generating capacity. I’m saying they should be required to pay for their system burden, which includes those things.

You’re over-focused on second order effects. For sure, some components of system costs rise and others fall with a transition to renewables (note, not solar only) and BESS. But when you argue system costs as a whole rise, you have to say vs what counterfactual fuel price path. Because fuel price volatility has driven massively larger spikes in system costs than anything renewables have done, as we Brits are all too aware after the gas spike post-Ukraine invasion.

For what it’s worth, I believe we will find valuable uses for over-capacity from electrolysis to desalination to fucking data centresCheap energy will create demand, not destroy value, in the long term.

understanding the difference between causation and correlation, perchance? Or is that just the tossers who did this work?

It wouldn’t be beyond the wit of humanity to require data centres to pay for all their own genny power, insist on it being low carbon, and require them to pay a fee on top of that. If it means some of them go off in a huff, well, that just lessens the strain. If they go bust in a bubble, we end up with lots of loverly overcapacity, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to rejig the distribution to take advantage of it.

There is no reason that taxpayers or domestic energy bill payers have to shoulder the costs or suffer the problems.

We managed to auction off spectrum quite well, and we have S108 for housing which is not brilliant but better than nothing. We should just bloody do the same, and if Matt Clifford kicks off about it, tell him he’s a clever cookie and can help Claude and BX and all the rest of them figure out their new NPV calculations.

Ah, well that’s the difference between public transport in North America and in Europe. In Europe you can get places by public transport in a reasonable amount of time, even in small cities.

I managed it in bloody Manchester in the 80s, schlepping around everywhere by bus. 45 minutes to Altrincham and an hour and a quarter to Marple, but it was worth it to see my mates.

You can drive an EV without using all its torque! You can drive off like a 90 year old granny, and accelerate very very slowly and very very smoothly.

Stop and go traffic is slow traffic. Driving slowly with lots of stop and go is way more efficient than driving freely at higher speeds. No one is breaking the laws of conservation of energy.

You do come up with endless weird reasoning about EVs, completely convoluted and endlessly misinterpreting what people are saying to you.

What? Where on *earth* did you hear that? There’s no material difference I’ve ever noticed in 10 years of driving EVs between regen in summer and winter. I have no idea where you get these ideas from.

My son has a second hand Renault Zoe, which we bought for 9k GBP. There were cheaper ones but we wanted a higher spec trim. It has a range of 230 miles. I presume that would be long enough to get your groceries. It can fit 338 litres in the boot or 1225 litres with the back seats down. I presume that’s enough to fit your groceries.

This logic doesn’t make sense. How can “chasing the lowest cost” have a net effect of “raising energy prices”? Sure, prices rise when demand starts to outstrip supply (which is what it means to say “the sun isn’t shining”), but the market sees that happen all the time anyway, because demand varies over the course of a day, and we have lots of non-dispatchable power on the grid which we supplement with expensive peakers.

All that’s needed for a BESS to be economically viable is for it to cost less to build and operate than a gas peaker. Which it does. The price at which it (and the peaker) gets to sell is a peculiar result of a mix of market and regulatory dynamics, but the costs are not driven by the same dynamics, they’re driven by costs of land acquisition, costs of fuel, costs of O&M, etc.

Whenever you look at system costs for power, you have to look at whole-system costs including PPM and downtime and intermittency and fuel and all the rest of it. Obviously. And if you do all that, you find that renewables + BESS is still cheaper.