Gideon David

@tfwrail hi, any idea what's going at central? Trains being held at platform 6 and its signal approach. Presumably nothing to do with the points failure at treherbert? My aberdare 1213 via city line now being held on platform 7 for some reason. Thanks

@lauriewhitwell Did the Greek police provide a character reference 🤐

FA have released reasons for Harry Maguire ban. Fourth official Matt Donahue alleges Maguire said: “You’re all a fucking joke.” Maguire’s defence: “I said something along lines of, ‘it is a fucking joke.’” Commission preferred Donahue testimony ⬇️ nytimes.com/athletic/71981…

@dorfman_p @Ed_Miliband @GBNgovuk Ffs, you're moaning about he brand name

@Ed_Miliband @GBNgovuk IAEA define SMRs as 300 MW output or less. At 470 MW the Rolls Royce design is simply not an SMR. It's 1/2 size of the main French reactors, 1/3 size of the massive EPR being built at Hinkley Point C. iaea.org/newscenter/new…

Contract signed 🤝 between Rolls-Royce SMR and @GBNgovuk to start building our first small modular reactors. SMRs will deliver clean, secure, homegrown energy for millions of homes and support thousands of jobs. A major step forward in our golden age of new nuclear power.

Britain’s energy security is more important than ever. That’s why we’re investing in British Nuclear - partnering with @GBNgovuk and Rolls-Royce SMR on small modular reactors to help secure Britain’s energy future.

Right now, British electricity pricing is bonkers. Prices are disconnected the from the underlying reality in several very important ways. 1. The costs of keeping the grid going, like transmission and balancing, are spread over every unit of electricity sold. This means the price of an extra unit of electricity is vastly higher than the social cost of providing that unit. The cost of having a grid connection at all is, conversely, much lower than it actually costs society to provide you one. Economically, this amounts to a crippling price cap on grid connections, which is part of why we can't expand infrastructure to plug people in: they don't pay for it. It also amounts to an enormous tax, over 2/3 of the price of electricity, on using an extra unit of it. Which is presumably why electricity use has cratered since 2003, when we started driving up the cost of our grid like this. Note how perverse the incentive is here. We are heading into a situation where electricity is extremely expensive because the ratio of grid costs to the amount of electricity put through that grid. Our high prices incentivise everyone to have a connection, but then to use it as little as possible, the EXACT opposite of what we need. We charge the most tax on people use their connection most intensively (i.e., efficiently) and the least on those who use it the least intensively! 2. We impose carbon taxes on electricity produced through gas that we don't impose on gas used directly. This is part of why electricity is so expensive, and means people electrify less than we would like, which leads to less decarbonisation overall. A child, with a basic understanding of supply and demand, would see how perverse this is. 3. We charge the same price for electricity nationwide, and pay the same amount, in a single market, even though electricity is worth more and less at different places. This is part of why people are building solar farms in Scotland, where it is not only less sunny, but which is on the other side of massive grid congestion that we are paying BILLIONS of pounds to relieve. Yet we keep paying people to make the problem worse. 4. We keep buying Contracts for Difference off electricity generators. CfDs say 'we will pay you X for every unit of electricity you produce, whenever you produce it'. (Recent iterations have cut off these payments when prices go negative, but they will still pay them £90 per megawatt hour when the megawatts they are producing are worth 1p each!) Renewables Obligations Certificates were a lot more honest. They just paid producers a top up on what they got on the open market: a straightforward subsidy. CfDs are a totally hidden subsidy. The amount of subsidy is set by the market trajectory after today. So, for example, every time we sign a new wind CfD we increase the subsidy for past tranches. The really messed up thing is that CfD recipients do not cover for when they don't provide any power. If the CfD was set on quantity as well, so generators had to pay back money when they didn't produce, to cover the cost of running the grid to accommodate them, and for the gas needed to keep the lights on, then we would get a good sense of how much we were actually paying. Buying a CfD would be buying new electricity at its going rate. Instead, practically all the important pricing functions are hidden. The result of all these broken pricing systems is poor coordination. Everyone is working exactly as the price system tells them to: plug in but only use your grid connection when the grid is having trouble, use less electricity, don't electrify, add generation far away from where it is consumed, and produce the most electricity possible whenever and wherever you like, not when or where it's rare and expensive. The ultimate result is expensive electricity, industrial decline, and economic stagnation.

@RachelReevesMP @GBNgovuk @Ed_Miliband Yes please. Keep em coming! ⚡️⚡️⚡️

@Ed_Miliband @GBNgovuk Great that this is finally moving ahead. Let's get shovels in the ground asap

the Tyne and Wear Metro is so good and it's completely ridiculous that every big city in the UK doesn't have its own version

Nuclear Waste Reprocessing: A Mega-🧵1/20! 1/ Imagine a technology that could take the most feared byproduct of nuclear power and transform it into fuel: burning the long-lived actinides that make spent fuel a supposed million-year liability down to fission products that decay to background radiation within a few centuries. All of this while extracting enough energy from the 95,000 metric tons of nuclear waste sitting in pools and dry casks across the United States to power the entire country for 150 years. That technology has been demonstrated. At Idaho National Laboratory, the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-2) ran for 30 years on metallic fuel cycled through an attached electrochemical reprocessing facility, closing the loop in exactly the way the vision describes: spent fuel in, fresh fuel out, waste reduced to a centuries-scale rather than geological-scale problem. The physics and engineering has been proven at pilot research scale. It has, however, failed to scale.

@DominicMcGregor HS2 is about freeing up capacity on existing lines...

We don’t need faster trains to London. I deeply believe that. The difference from 2 hours to 1 hour 30 is nominal. What we need is a better experience. There’s a psychological concept called temporal perception. Time feels longer when you’re frustrated and shorter when you’re absorbed. That buffering wheel. The email that won’t send. The Teams call dropping mid-sentence. That’s not a 2 hour journey. That feels like 4. Give every passenger reliable WiFi and a plug socket and the journey shrinks not on the timetable, but in the mind. Now @elonmusk & @Starlink can now do this. So why are we waiting. HS2 cost billions to save 30 minutes. Better WiFi would give that time back every single day.

Farage hates this video of him revealing his plans to sell off the NHS. It would be a shame if it went viral again... 🫢

@hol40900 Bot

Scott Mills sacked. Finally. But how many allegations—how many women—had to speak up before the BBC acted? Another case where “personal conduct” becomes a workplace crisis only when it hits the press. Women’s safety in media shouldn’t depend on who gets caught. #r4today

@Sam_Dumitriu Will be interesting when pylons are eventually built - i suspect there will be opposition from those living near wind turbines to their free electricity going elsewhere!

This is a good idea, but we're doing it in the most Soviet way possible. DESNZ ruled out using locational price signals, but are now reverse-engineering market outcomes via adminstrative diktat. It's like when the Soviets tried to deal with the fact their factories were extremely inefficient by introducing a complex system of bonuses to replicate how factories behaved in a market economy. Better than nothing, but strictly worse than actually letting markets work.

In November, Maastricht introduced the Netherlands' first “fietszone” or cycle-priority zone, which takes the concept of “fietsstraten”—streets where cars are treated as guests—and applies it across the entire city centre within the ring roads, rather than on a single corridor.🧵

Ras Laffan and the Arctic Metagaz: How two drones changed the calculus of global LNG dependence A Mega 🧵based on my @DecoupleMedia conversation with @SStapczynski Qatar is roughly the size of Connecticut, a narrow peninsula jutting into the Persian Gulf on the wrong side of the Strait of Hormuz. For decades, this geography was considered a manageable risk, because Qatar had cultivated a reputation for perfect reliability. When Japan shut down its reactor fleet after Fukushima in 2011 and scrambled to replace the lost generation with gas, Qatar delivered. When spot and short-term suppliers, including an Italian energy major and at least one trading house, voided their flexible contracts with Pakistan during the 2022 price spike and rerouted those cargoes to European buyers willing to pay more, Qatar delivered those too. Then a $50,000 Iranian drone struck Ras Laffan.

@MatthewMarks42 @newmoneyreview @ZackPolanski The UK needs long duration seasonal energy storage. There is no way that batteries can scale up that sort of capacity. And even if the tech develops, its likely to require a massive increase in mining for raw materials, so lots of pollution

@newmoneyreview @ZackPolanski That's what storage is for. And just like solar and wind power, it's rapidly developing.

Energy insecurity. Higher bills. Exposure to catastrophic economic consequences of Trump's wars. That's what happens when you fail to shift fast enough to renewables, and cut back on support for clean energy. Let's cut bills & create jobs through a clean power revolution.

@ZackPolanski I'm up for wind and solar, but their intermittency require fossil fuels as back up when there is no wind and sun. More renewables therefore lock in gas dependency. Nuclear on the other hand...

@Plaid_Cymru Should have waited an extra 5 mins for one of the new Flirts. Best trains in the UK

Mae Cymru yn parhau i fod ar ei cholled pan ddaw at ariannu ein rheilffyrdd. Dyma pam. Welsh rail is STILL owed billions in rail. Here's how.

@AccidentalP 'Who invented the skip?!'

#AccidentalPartridge #AlexPhillips