energy in UK

Buried services are about five times as expensive as aerial services.

Joe

In the UK the only outlet that isn't earthed (and today is double isolated) is the 2pin mains shaver socket in the bathroom.

Your house hasn't been rewired since the 1950's? Hasn't the rubber insulation deteriorated almost to the point of no return by now?

Ozone seems to make it quite tacky or cracked when it becomes antique.

Not how it works in the UK. Advice is don't admit liability at the scene and call your insurers claims number immediately. They take care of pretty much everything after that unless there is evidence of criminality or serious injuries resulted and a police investigation.

Recent juicy one with a BMW chase in Newcastle that totalled 5 police cars in a Keystone cops style hard stop incident. They initially only wanted to tell him that his rear brake light was defective too.

Dunno. The power where I live is flaky enough that farms and cafes have their own emergency generators so that power outages don't catch them out. Cows still need milking mains electricity or no.

A lot of the crashes round here never officially happened since they typically take out a chunk of hedge on the exit of a tight bend. Single vehicle incidents late at night probably drunks.

The 5-to-1 is installation only, but it's hard for decreased maintenance and repair to make enough difference to tilt the balance. In US's New England (where I live), there is enough rock that burying is often impossible without blasting.

The original US example of burying all services is Columbia Maryland, which was created from cornfields as a big development, so it was practical to install the services using very large vibrating-blade plows before anything else was built.

Joe Gwinn

When the business folk do the analysis, if the payback time is longer than two or three years, it simply isn't worth the investment, so isn't done.

That's typical.

It varies. In the last house that my parents had built (in the 1960s if I recall) had an immense boulder (with a spring) in one corner of the basement. They considered having it removed, which could only be done by blasting. While this was easily done safely, it proved far too expensive, so the boulder remained, with its own drainage system leading to the sea.

A house that my then widowed father bought many years later also had a granite ledge under one part of the first floor, so the basement was a third the size one would expect.

Thankfully, in New England we don't have such problems.

Closest was New Jersey, where our back yard was hard-pan clay - it took a pickaxe to dig that stuff up. Which I did, precisely to make a flower bed.

Maryland is mostly mud around there. Very fertile soil.

Joe

AFAIK, flares have never been used here.

My father used nothing, nothing was mandatory or recommended. Put on the lights: not the blinkers both left and right, cars did not have that feature. In an accident, it was recommended for another car to park perpendicular to the scene and illuminate it with his headlights.

Triangles became recommended and then mandatory after I got my driving license.

If you set neither triangles not beacon, and they find you, you get fined.

Yep. But I don't know if this part is working yet.

Indeed.

It seems to happen more in the urban highways of Madrid, not so much on the long distance highways. In the former, traffic is going to/from work/home, and are mostly city folk, not necessarily used to long distance driving on highways.

Accidents seem to happen mostly near home, people feel safe and less alert.

Sigh.

Here people standing on the road have to mandatorily wear reflective vests. Some are hit precisely while putting it on.

In that situation, I keep my eye on incoming traffic.

Yes, I have seen that in Canada.

Yes, that needs special hardware passing on the signals.

Cost of progress.

And AC suffer more losses.

Floods can kill underground service, too.

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new word to me.

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Was this cause and effect? :-)

I hope not :-D

China is building a big coal-powered power plant a week. Maybe the UK can run a long cable and buy electricity from them.

Maybe do like the aussies and sell them coal.

Many of those are to replace aging, inefficient, highly polluting plants.

The number of new approvals has dropped significantly recently while the amount of coal fired generation has actually gone down even though electricity consumption has increased.

John Larkin gets his misinformation from climate change denial websites. They do a lot of lying by omission. John Larkin doesn't seem to know enough to notice, and is too vain to admit that he has been suckered.

This morning I noticed a water meter visible from the street because there was no lid or door on the hole on the wall, and it was curious. The plastic lid on the meter was open, and could not be closed, because on top of the glass or transparent plastic there had been attached another device that occluded the view of the readings completely. I suspect this "backpack" is the radio device that perhaps takes a photo of the reading and sends that using some variant of slow GSM.

Or my interpretation could be wrong.

It is only one meter; I will be looking for more in the neighbourhood. My own meter is under a heavy iron lid that I do not know how to lift, so I can not look at it.

It looked similar to this one:

I know it is bad form to follow up your own post but my description above is actually not as bad as it really is. The situation for most UK business users is in fact considerably worse than I believed to be true.

BBC Verify researchers did a thing recently on global electricity prices and UK Green Energy. Electricity for most British industry is insanely expensive (more so than I had thought). Compares a range of countries.

Only a handful of preferred dumpable load balancing industrial users get the tariff that I described most UK heavy power users are robbed blind! No wonder Tata and now the Chinese want to close Scunthorpre steelworks.

Same in Spain, if I understood correctly the phrase. No, I can not explain it.

For the record, the rate I pay in the Boston area is 16.3 US pennies per kwh. The UKP is 1.33 USD, so that translates to 12.3 pence per kwh.

Small industrial users near Boston pay slightly more, 20.14 US pennies per kwh. Larger users pay less, maybe 10 US pennies.

Joe

It's actually the marginal cost, the cost to make an additional unit of whatever is being made. In economics math, this is the derivative of the price versus volume (units sold) curve.

Joe

My most recent domestic electricity bill was 27.644p per kWh plus

It's causing the UK and EU to de-industrialize.

I found a comprehensive list of electric rates in the US:

.

But we still have far too many regulations and regulators.

Joe