Governments across Europe are telling people and businesses to reduce energy use. Do they know something we don't?

[cakeorwine]

It feels like Covid again. Warning signs of an issue. But no action taken.

I know there are people who will reduce usage because of the increased costs.

But there is still a lot of waste and things where energy usage can be reduced to ensure that we have enough gas and electricity available during a demanding winter.

The media has advice on reducing use. There are schemes to encourage people to use electricity outside of peak time.

But shouldn't the Government be leading on this?

Not owning a nuclear power plant building company any more was also a mistake.

Hopefully we'll be looking at getting more insulation work done on the houses that can have it done easily. The more difficult stuff (and contraversial) like cladding might need some more thinking about and making sure it's safe.

Reducing the amount of energy we use is something we should all have been thinking about. Not just now because it costs so much.
Growing up we weren't allowed to mess with the thermostat or leave lights on. We had to shut doors to keep the heat in. All very common sense, but in the intervening years we have forgotten all that.

Almost certainly because there is some kind of profit in it for JRM. He’s a parasite of the most extreme kind and cares nothing for anyone but himself.

An intelligent government that spoke to us as adults explaining their plan and our part in it, things would be calmer.

Unfortunately we in the UK have this Tory government.😱 A bunch of arrogant, incompetent, corrupt, liars in charge. No one could destabilise the UK any further than this shower of fuckwits.

Educating people (in a non patronising way) to realise there's a reason their bills are so high. Having the government wave a magic wand doesn't stop the cause.

At least when bills were high people thought twice before turning up the thermostat.

This.

Are people so stupid they need the government to tell them they need to reduce power consumption?

People need the govt to tell them there are problems with energy supplies?!! Who doesn't know?
But what difference would it make? People will use how much they want up to the point they can't afford it. We've known about how the use of energy is destroying the planet, so if they haven't made changes for that, why would they for this?

Although, if governments in the rest of Europe said nothing about being careful but Truss did, you can just hear people on her saying how hopeless Truss was in not managing energy better. And suddenly they'd be praising the other govts for not saying anything.

Clearly people are very stupid because many believed the price cap of 2.5k meant they wouldn't pay more than that (and that seems to have included our prime minister!). People also seem to not understand that you pay for what you use! No shit Sherlock, amazing! If I turn my heating on 24/7 I actually pay per hour! Omg 😱

Yes people are stupid and need to be told, unfortunately.

I don’t think the Gov know anything we don’t know as in some awful secret they’re not telling us about energy. It’s been obvious for months that there is an energy shortage and when winter really hits will need to be rationing of some sort.

I can’t believe I am saying this but even an idiot can be right once. Truss was right to not spend £15m on a leaflet lecturing the British poor on how to be poor. The ministers who were complaining about their campaign made comments about how “ignorant people” are and that their “instinct is that too many go about wearing T-shirts at home all winter when they should really put a jumper on and turn the heating down a degree or two” another comment was “people should know to turn the radiators off in empty rooms” to “charge their Tesla overnight”. I fully believe the “campaign” would have been extremely tone deaf and offensive.

Sadly Truss has so completely binned her reputation that she can do nothing right. So that’s why the fuss (in this case).

The simple truth is that governments should have been preparing for reduced fossil fuel supplies 30 years ago. I’ve picked up an old 1990’s book in the marketplace this am, just to prove to my kids that we did know about such issues back then, but government decided it preferred to enable the more wealthy people to become more consumerist than ever. So no, they don’t know anything that we and they haven’t known about for a very long time.

Yes we knew about this in the 1990s, but don’t think you can prove anything beyond that. After all in the 1990s we didn’t have solar panels, wind turbines or electric vehicles. All our vehicles and planes emitted way waaaay more CO2 per mile than they do now. We had no energy efficiency standards for anything. We had no home insulation programs. Most of our electricity came from burning coal for christs sake. Our per capita energy consumption and CO2 emissions have gone down, not up.

Yes, the successive governments didn’t make moving off fossil fuels a high enough priority but to say they’ve made anyone “more consumerist than ever” is simply not true.

Stats
UK's net generated electricity 2018 compared to 1990.

Gas: 39.5% (0.05% in 1990)
Nuclear: 19.5% (19% in 1990)
Wind: 17.1% (0% in 1990)
Biomass: 10.4% (0% in 1990)
Coal: 5.1% (67% in 1990)
Solar: 3.9% (0% in 1990)
Hydroelectric: 1.6% (2.6% in 1990)
Oil and other: 2.9% (12% in 1990)

Not quite true: these things were all being developed and researched then, there was a lot of research into how to prepare for this.
There was also huge frustration because governments weren't heeding the advice and warnings. (I completed an MSc in energy issues in the mid 2000s.)

There were both solar panels and wind turbines in the 90s. Perhaps not as efficient as today’s, but the 90s is when they started to become available. It depends what side of the 90s you’re looking at - I think Ecotricity was founded - just checked, 1995. I had a renewable energy tariff by 2002 at the latest. The middle classes of the time could have done far more to cut use, but were more interested in making themselves richer by pushing up house prices for us younger folk. And then using their new found wealth to travel abroad in increasing quantities using polluting aircraft.

R&D comes before being put into operational use. See my stats.
0% energy from solar
0% energy from wind
0% energy from biomass
67% energy from burning coal

Totally true, if not then we could all pretend we have cold fusion energy right now because it’s being “researched”

I agree that a direct campaign from government would have been on thin ice because their credibility is so low. I'd do a 2 pronged approach.

Trusted third parties like Martin Lewis/The One Show/David Attenborough being roped in to give handy general energy saving hints on how to adjust your boiler for optimum performance or whatever (which is advice that people would actually benefit from).

And a very specific "keep the lights on" campaign run through energy suppliers through the winter peaks run by real time texts/emails saying "energy use expected to peak in your area 4pm-6pm, please if possible delay putting your oven on until 6:30/use the microwave/bathe the kids immediately after school - that way we can keep the lights and freezers on. Thanks, we appreciate you doing your bit to defeat Putin." Possibly backed up with financial incentives for people with smart meters to reduce use at peak time.

Wind turbines and solar photovoltaics are Victorian technology, same as batteries and EVs. There is nothing revolutionary about the technology, only improvements in manufacturing because of materials science and digitisation.

Carter famously had PV cells on the White House during the ‘70s energy crises. Until Reagan tore them down after the likes of Prudhoe Bay and Gulf of Mexico came on stream, or the North Sea for us.

Fine 1999 % electricity production in U.K.:
Coal 31.9%
Oil 1.9%
Natural Gas 34%
Nuclear 27.9%
Hydro. 0.6%
Wind & Solar 0.09%
Other 3.5%

So less than 1% of electricity generated by hydro, wind or solar.

btw
Total fuel input in million tonnes of oil equivalent:
1990 76.34
1999 79.72

2018 59.88

Energy consumption has gone down, not up.

Yes I know. But in 1990, 0% of energy was generated for the U.K. grid by this technology and only 1.5% in 1999 from all these sources. So we didn’t have them in the 1990s generating any electricity at all for any households or any businesses.

Consumption has gone down due to loss of heavy manufacturing, efficiency gains, and people being priced out of the market. These trends are seen in a lot of post-industrial First World nations now.

For reference, solar and wind produce 3.3% of total global energy circa 2019.

We currently consume less electricity now than we did in 1965.
Population then was 54.24 million.
Population now is 68.69 million.

To say the government/we/middle class have either done nothing or consume more than ever is simply not true.

Very'I'm alright Jack' then.

As above, that is due to various moves made through those several decades in terms of loss of things like steel making, more efficient consumer and commercial systems, and people using less either willingly or not. Per capita consumption more or less peaked in the ‘70s, curiously, around the same time personal income did.

At that point, and definitely since the millennium, the developing world has been growing their consumption far more. Although the West has the lion’s share of embodied energy in goods shipped to us from the likes of China now (electricity is, while important, not even the majority of energy usage).

If people signing up to fixed rate contracts haven't read how it works, why would they read any leaflets? Surely they would just go, "this doesn't apply to me because my FR says I can use however much I like."
In my experience, stupid people are the very ones who won't be told.

Correct. It’s not all due to going green.

Just objecting to the narrative of “we’ve known since the 1990s but governments decided to let x “consume more than ever” or the implication that we as a society have done fuck all about getting off fossil fuels for the past thirty years.

I am a bit sensitive to it because it’s the false narrative that Extinction Rebellion and it’s offshoots feed to the unwary with their propaganda.

Im green myself and think such lies actually hurt the environmental movement as a whole. People don’t like being lied to and they eventually find out that such and such is a lie, then they can’t trust anything else about real environmental issues that do exist and we do need to keep pushing to address.

People be like that, aye.