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It comes from an idea that economic progress is coupled with increased energy use, a fallacy that hasn't been true for decades, even for fossil fuels. It's well established that the cheapest additional capacity is efficiency. One of the reasons I am not so concerned about the AI energy needs, especially because the US has a lot of wiggle room.

> There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and increased importing of electricity

Right – those things aren't great. What's so amusing or outrageous about pointing that out?

> Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.

Did the link say they were? Maybe I missed it.

Thats a basic misrepresentation though. And the condescending fear mongering out 'telegraph-esque' does not help.

The quote is:

"Deindustrialization has reduced demand,"

Leaving out 'Deindustrialization' is leaving out most of the story.

That is the gaph of industrial decline.

It's not that the 'dishwashers' are using less electricty so much as dishwashers are no longer designed and made in the UK. That is the story.

Probably less than 20% of that curve is 'green good news' - 80% of it is deindustrialization which is a primary economic malaise.

That deindustrialization is now starting to hit 'core' industry like auto - and a fundamental driver of the far right.

Industrial use of electricy is about where it was in the 1980s because industry ha moved elsewhere, like China.

AfD cannot get enough votes without that curve - Mercedes is closing down while China expands. That's the story.

> "I was at a conference ... these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease"

For a long time (several decades) electricity demand has been decreasing in the UK, largely due to efficiency improvements. But now days pretty much everyone agrees that electricity demand will increase significantly in the future due to electrification. The UK has been planning for this for some time so if this guy was really from National Grid, he sounds like a bit of a rogue!

> "their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like"

No, nobody is suggesting that the grid will ever cut off power to anybody - certainly not domestic customers. The idea is that in a smart grid, big industrial customers often have the ability to temporarily reduce demand for heat or cooling or whatever. So if there is a signal from the grid that demand needs to be cut, automated industrial systems can (and already do) do that. The same goes for your car charging, water heating, etc. These things can automatically slow down during demand peaks in response to a signal from the grid, and you probably won't notice or care. You'll still be able to wash your dishes any time you want!

This is all definitely a good thing. A huge part of the cost of running the grid is in handling the biggest demand peaks, which might only occur for an hour or two per day a few times per year. If the peaks can be reduced and demand becomes smoother, then energy becomes cheaper.

There's a weird "degrowth" mindset that has taken hold in progressive circles in many countries lately. I don't understand them at all, trying to communicate with them is like dealing with an alien species.

> But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.

I've seen proposals that are less intermittent availability and more incentivized pushing of consumption towards periods of lower demand. We already have all these computers in our appliances, might as well let them do reasonable things ... your freezer probably does a self-defrost cycle triggered by a timer and/or a door open counter, but why not wait up to X hours for off-peak pricing to do it. Or push the set points down a degree or two during off-peak pricing, to reduce energy use during on-peak. Also works for HVAC subject to user comfort, and water heaters if you're careful and avoid high temperatures that cause injury or low temperatures that allow microorganism growth.

Of course, that's science fiction... all the communication in appliances is designed to collect data and serve targeted ads. :( So very few appliances know if current pricing is peak/off peak or when it will change.

I'm making the assumption that by National Grid, you mean the UK's electricity system operator, with National Grid (private company) being replaced by a NESO (public company).

> had in mind that electricity demand should decrease

Does this mean the speaker wanted demand to decrease? The UK forecasts from the Future Energy Scenarios [1] show demand increasing (see page 21).

> intermittent availability of power.

I'm assuming this was related to demand side response. Page 37 of the Future Energy Scenarios pdf contains an overview of this.

I worked at an EV smart charging start up (Kaluza) between 2019-2022 and my experience doesn't line up with a couple of your points:

> You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like

During my time at Kaluza the customer could charge their EV whenever they wanted.

> you will have to adapt to when there is spare power,

The customer set their minimum state-of-charge (0-100%) and we would always have it charged to that amount by a specified time, irrespective of demand. We aimed to charge the customer's EV when demand was low (there are UK markets we can sell this ability to - these markets may have changed since I was there), which would save them money, but meeting the minimum SoC was the most important thing.

> This is just a regression in technological progress

Reducing peak demand reduces the amount of infrastructure you need and makes better use of what you have. IMO it's a good upgrade that makes much better use of the assets on the grid.

Vehicle-to-Grid (or Home) charging takes this up a level by feeding power back to the grid. This "What’s next for Vehicle-to-Everything?" PDF [2] is 4 years old now, but has some good data on V2G and the benefits it brings.

1. https://www.neso.energy/document/364541/download

2. https://info.kaluza.com/hubfs/What%E2%80%99s%20next%20for%20....

The Tories sold off the national grid, it’s a public listed company now. They don’t want to build infrastructure, they want to maximise shareholder value.

They are not morons, they simply understand the future better than you do. I don't care when my clothes or my dishes are washed, I am not at home most of the day. This will win out because it's now and will continue to be the cheapest way to produce energy. The way these things will work, they will ve completely automated, it's something you can do today with mainstream consumer appliances.

Can you provide a source for either of your claims?

Thiel might have been right about the greens - the degrowth is so anti-human and destructive to society.

You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries.

Firstly, that doesn't sound like a particularly hard thing to accept if it genuinely helps. "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment.

However, regardless of that, this isn't new. There have been time-of-day based electricity tariffs for decades that are aimed at incentivising people to do more demanding things at particular times e.g. when industry isn't using the power. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7

Thanks. We have insane stupid politcians in charge of our energy, like the Tories and Ed Miliband who recently failed upwards into the Foreign Office. These guys couldn't care less about consumers and are obsessed with the enviroment and carbon.

On the surface it sounds like a good thing to worry about the enviroment, but in reality government policy is insane and stupid. As one example, the UK in it's wisdom don't allow North Sea oil extraction, the Norweigans do. And guess who we are buying electricity from? On top of that, the UK's overall contribution to carbon emissions are insignificant compared to China. We just pay more money for electricity for no good reason. Obviously we use less electricity, we can't afford it. And Labour enviromentalists see that as a win.

Street Lighting. Sodium lamps used 250-500W and LEDs are 50-150W. Councils have been replacing the former with the latter ever since it was possible, as the savings were apparent after only a few years (and, the early investors could sell the old bulbs to authorities who did not have the funds to invest)

There is also a substantial saving in household appliances from all the EU laws as well that have pretty substantially cut power consumption, including a lot of computers and devices at idle.

The UK household has quite significantly cut its power due to all these power saving innovations, far in excess of the actual drop because industry has increased its percentage of the mix over time.

Power management (ACPI) in desktop computers also arrived in the late 1990s. Power saving sleep modes have a big impact.

Computer fleets across a country do not upgrade immediately so the lag may contribute.

And ACPI was just one energy saving initiative of that era.

You’re right a lot of this will be domestic lighting changing.

That said, UK manufacturing decline also correlates with this as that’s very energy intensive. Also don’t rule out fridges, old 90s fridges were very energy intensive compared to today.

> Improved efficiency is also supporting reduced use in the industrial sector – as has a general decline in GB industry and associated intensive electricity use

https://energy.drax.com/intelligence/2024-the-year-electrici...

> This is part of a larger trend. Demand has been falling by 5 TWh per year since 2005. Improving efficiency (lighting, televisions, fridges, etc.), fewer homes using electric heating, and deindustrialisation all play a part

https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/?p=2065

In the summer. In the winter the heat from the bulbs would help heating the homes, offices, stores, etc.

Industrial output now is much higher in real terms than in the 70s.

Dying from heatstroke in the summer is a third.

Certainly doesn't help that AI datacenters use energy consumption as a stand-in for scale, so now the "line must go up" market growth psychology is spreading into power consumption overall as a bigger = better thing.

The spot price is set according to the most expensive source but that is not the same thing as the price the consumer pays.

So for example, for wind power the consumer effectively pays the CfD strike price, largely irrespective of the spot price.

Fwiw, I do agree we have a problem with power being too expensive, but it's more complex than just the consumer pays the most expensive source.

Look into a battery + inverter + optional solar on a time of use tariff, you can be always off peak. Payback probably isn't very long.

Balancing auctions are pay-as-bid, the alternative is lights-off.

Capacity auctions are iirc pay as clear. Maybe day ahead as well.

One thing to consider as well is that without some external stimulus scheme all of the fossil/nuclear (even ignoring CFD schemes) would immediately go bust IIRC if the market was solely pay-as-bid because wind and solar are cheap but extremely spotty so the price would either be 0 or 1000, probably not the latter long enough to keep the gas plants we currently rely on in business => no more power on cold calm nights.

It can be good or bad depending on what's driving the change. Improving efficiency, assuming it comes at a reasonable cost, is generally good.

If people are just going without, then that's generally bad.

Only 9% of the UK is electric only heating [1], so I suspect heating is not a large driver here.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

No it's a catastrophic failure of planning and institutional nerve.

Just an observation, but my first thought was how energy demand strongly correlates with economic growth and wondered if the article could be cast in that light. Might be fun to overlay that graph with UK gilt rates

edit: helpful robot boyfriend plotted it https://i.imgur.com/Hp199vV.png

Isn’t most of the housing in the UK from the 1970’s too?

jevon's paradox says that improved efficiencies would increase consumption

I see a lot of comments here see "per capita" and think "residential consumption" - but the decrease is more indicating of general deindustrialization

In the '70s you weren't guaranteed to get the electricity you paid for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week

> From 1 January 1974, commercial users of electricity were limited to three specified consecutive days' consumption each week and prohibited from working longer hours on those days. Services deemed essential (e.g. hospitals, telephone switchboards, supermarkets and newspaper printing presses) were exempt. Television companies were required to cease broadcasting at 22:30 to conserve electricity [...] The Three-Day Week restrictions were lifted on 7 March 1974.

But nonetheless: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historic...

    Year  Avg consumer price in today's money
    1975  13p/kWh
    1985  15p/kWh
    1995  n/a
    2005  11p/kWh
    2015  17p/kWh
    2025  26p/kWh

1) we have to pay off operators for the billions of foreign investment they put into new wind and solar farms and grid storage batteries. If we didn't tempt them with a good RoI, they'd invest elsewhere, and we'd still be burning coal. The cost of this is going down year on year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...

2) we're paying for new transmission capacity and replacing worn out transmission route. The fact we don't already have it, which we could've had by charging more for electricity in the 2000s and building it out decades ago, is why today we face enormous curtailment costs today, as we can't get all this wind power from where it's generated to where it's consumed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/10/05/the-bottlene...

3) our market arrangement is based on everyone bidding to supply power, and we pay everyone who generates the same rate as the highest necessary bidder. Thus the moment that there isn't enough wind power, or there is but it can't get to the region it's needed (see point 2), in come the gas turbines and given that Russia's trying to destroy Ukraine, gas is astronomically expensive. The sooner we solve our bottlenecks and decommission all the gas turbines, the better.

Over the 20th century, people switched from fuel based lighting, heating and cooking to electric, and acquired laundry machines, dishwashers, fridges, TVs, air conditioning etc etc. So electricity was a pretty good proxy for a certain aspect of quality of life. It might be a less useful measure in the developed world in the 21st century as we have kind of plateaued on energy-intensive appliances and are more focused on efficiency, and because other aspects of quality of life like pollution, work, mental health etc may be more salient.

Seems like a bit of misconception given it has coal (more relevant historically), iron, North Sea gas, a temperate climate, fisheries and coastline, plenty of arable land and more recently massive potential for renewable energy.

Why would energy generation fall off a cliff if the population increases by 12 million? How does that makes sense?