Watching From The Sidelines

@NahMateUK @robhawkes wastedwind.energy/2026-03-25

@robhawkes And what, £5-10mm curtailment costs today? Why don’t you add that metric?

Did we just break the wind generation record today, twice? On the train right now so will validate later…

@FurkanGozukara Follow the money.......

Absolute bombshell. James O'Brien exposes massive insider trading just before Trump announced a ceasefire. 8 newly created accounts placed massive bets on a US-Iran ceasefire with obvious insider knowledge. The corruption of this war is staggering.

@OctopusEnergy Where do I opt in?

People who live in areas with plenty of turbines should benefit from lower bills and help to stop wasted wind adding costs for everyone. Good to see government moving forward with these important principles.

@glynhudson There's a video and or podcast in there somewhere 🤣

I've finally got Predbat setup to automatically control my GivEnergy AC coupled battery based on Octopus Agile tariff, it was a pain to setup, but it's very impressive 🤓🔋

@DaleVince A solar panel costs less than £100.

Second family in this story have 12k to spend on solar panels, and gov will give them 8k for a heat pump. What about people in energy poverty, its obscene, its wrong. thetimes.com/article/ba15a1…

@WindrushWasp petition.parliament.uk/petitions/7574…

We have to campaign for what the environment and people need, not what our government and the polluters have said they might let us have - if we play nicely and let them keep milking our bills. Channel 4's #DirtyBusiness has put us in front of the goal. Let's not waste that. We don't need 'campaign victories', we need an end to the privatisation scam. Real fish WERE killed by Thames Water pre the making of this video. Thousands of them

@greenarteries petition.parliament.uk/petitions/7574…

“Former Environment Sec Steve Barclay has asked in Parliament why there has been no prosecution after hundreds of dead fish were found floating in a dyke [nr Whittlesey Cambs] Anglian Water which is responsible for the dyke has been contacted for comment” bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@ArturNadol7566 petition.parliament.uk/petitions/7574…

SOUTH WEST WATER TURNS DEVON INTO A TOILET 37 years after privatisation, the great British seaside now comes with a swim, a rash, and a small prayer that the dog does not come back glowing. Last year there were nearly 15,000 illegal sewage spills on dry days across England, with @SouthWestWater managing more than 4,300 of them on its own. Quite the achievement. Some firms build legacies. These lot build faecal weather systems. Then comes the usual corporate lullaby about “investment” and “improvement”, which is always touching from companies that have treated rivers and beaches like a giant open sewer. @Channel4 "Dirty Business" barely needed dramatisation. It simply reported the old British tradition of regulators napping, executives cashing in, and the public being used as unpaid test strips for human waste. The series is based on real whistleblowers, campaigners and victims, including Heather Preen, the eight-year-old who died after contracting E. coli linked to contaminated seawater in Devon. At this point, fines are not punishment. They are just a subscription fee for poisoning the coast. Prison is the only deterrent left, because shame clearly floated out to sea years ago. Source: The Sunday Times, March 22, 2026, Chris Haslam, @dromomaniac “Water companies are ruining our seaside: prison is the only deterrent”. @TransparencyTF

@latimeralder Strange data you are using. Try grid.iamkate.com

Britain's electricity production right now: Oops! Solar power, 0%. Should I make a sacrifice to Greta to hope it comes back again?

@syniodesign @andyffff @OctopusEnergy @g__j @BBCNewsnight Cherry picking one day of data 🤔 Maybe you should have scrolled down and checked the annual figure.... Here let me fix it for you.

@andyffff @OctopusEnergy @g__j @BBCNewsnight Heat pumps run on electricity? and gas is used to power them 🤣

We've got to electrify everything. This can't be another Groundhog Day - it has to be the wake-up call. Our CEO @g__j was on @BBCNewsnight, repeating exactly what he said during the last gas crisis three-ish years ago. When Britain depends on gas it doesn't have, your bill pays the difference. Different crisis, same dependency.

@paullewismoney Does this include EVs

Some papers reporting govt is considering a nationwide 50mph speed limit on cars to cut fuel use. Which is great news as I am limited to 20mph on almost all roads near me!

@labourlewis @ChrisGPackham petition.parliament.uk/petitions/7574…

In the more than decade I have had the privilege of serving as your MP for Norwich South, I don’t think I have ever attended a meeting quite as moving as the one we held in Parliament this week. We hosted the people behind Channel 4’s Dirty Business. It tells the true story of campaigners and families who have spent years fighting not just water companies, but a system that was meant to protect us and has too often failed. Many of you will know that since introducing my Private Member’s Bill to bring water back into public ownership, I have been raising these issues in Parliament and beyond. I have heard the evidence. I have read the reports. I have listened to accounts of pollution, regulatory failure, and companies putting profit before the public good. But nothing prepares you for sitting in a room with people who have lived the consequences. The most difficult moment came when we heard from a mother who lost her daughter after exposure to polluted water. Her story is part of the series, but hearing it in person was something else entirely. To hear her voice break as she described the moment she lost her child is something I will not forget. There was no anger in her tone. No performance. Just grief, dignity, and a determination that no other family should go through what she did. At the end of the meeting, she came over to speak to me. She gave me a hug and thanked me for the work we have been doing to bring water back into public ownership. I have to be honest. That meant more to me than almost anything else I have experienced in Parliament. Because in that moment, this stopped being about policy, or process, or politics. It became about something much simpler. What kind of country allows this to happen? And what kind of country decides it will not allow it to happen again? For years, we have been told that this system works. That it just needs tweaking. Better regulation. Stronger oversight. But when a system allows pollution on this scale, when it fails families in this way, when it continues to reward failure with profit, we have to be honest about what we are dealing with. This is not a system that is broken. It is a system doing exactly what it was designed to do. That is why I believe there is no alternative to bringing our water back into public, democratic ownership. Not as an abstract idea. Not as ideology. But because it is the only way to align this essential service with the public interest. The people I met this week are not politicians. They are not lobbyists. They are ordinary members of the public who have given years of their lives to holding power to account. They are the ones who have tested the water, gathered the evidence, fought the legal battles, and refused to be ignored. They are the ones who have carried this issue when others would not. They are, quite simply, the reason this fight continues. And it will continue. Because water is not just another commodity. It is something we all rely on, something we all share, and something that should belong to all of us. So we keep going.

@robhawkes Excellent work Robin.

Random Internet person: "But this one unsubstantiated datapoint about a single heat pump that 'someone I know' / my plumber mate / [insert random third-party here] says they're shit" How about real, near-realtime data from every single one of the many thousands of real Cosy heat pumps already installed by Octopus Energy in real homes? That's a really big dose of real. That's what we've done with the Cosy Heat Pump Fleet Performance Dashboard, released today. Let's talk about what the data says right now, not some hypothetical argument about what it might say tomorrow. Why hide behind marketing speak and hypotheticals when we can show you what the real data says about real heat pump installations in real homes? There aren't many energy suppliers out there who will go out of their way to put data like this out for the public to see. And when the request for this transparency comes right from the top, you know you're in the right place. It's a reminder of why I've spent the last 4+ years at Octopus. We did this around direct debit transparency with Balance Forecast, one of the first projects I worked on when I joined Octopus all those years ago. And we're still doing it today with this heat pump dashboard. It's been a pleasure working on this project and helping with the visualisations to help break down the frankly insane amount of raw data into insights around fleet-wide efficiency over time and how performance changes with the temperature. It also tops the list as the dashboard with the longest name that I've ever worked on…

@kaya85kaya @DaleVince You forgot battery storage

@DaleVince Seperate Gas from non-gas generation Gas sets the price of gas and is last in line Wind Solar Biomass are paid zero £0 because sunshine is free and wood grows on trees Of the wond farm owners complain. Stright to jail

History is repeating itself. Here comes another fossil fuel energy crisis and we still have an energy market where the price of the green energy we make here in Britain is tied to the global price for gas. I’ve called on successive governments to break this absurd link, to no avail. We have the means to nail our energy bills to the floor and keep them there, and reap massive economic benefits to doing so, through lower inflation and lending rates. The current fee for all in wholesale energy creates windfall profits for oil companies at great expense to the rest of us and the country we live in. mirror.co.uk/money/no-10-ur…

@JohnSimpsonNews It's about the Hezbollah assets stored in the building. Weapons, equipment, cash. Yes cash. You don't seriously think they fight for free do you 🤨

I don’t get it. If Hezbollah had flats in this block (unlikely in central Beirut but not impossible) why did the Israelis give everyone inside an hour to get out — including those they wanted to kill? And if there weren’t any Hezbollah people there, why destroy a building with dozens of civilians in it?

@DaleVince petition.parliament.uk/petitions/7574…

Our privatised water industry is not just dirty, not just toxic - it’s lethal. We need to take it back into public control. Decades long failures to invest what is needed, despite constantly rising bills - prioritising dividends to foreign shareholders instead - and now this. It's criminal neglect. Putting money before people - looks like this. Privatisation looks like this. theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/m…

@highfields2020 @evmanuk @OctopusEnergy Good question. Ask your DNO.

@evmanuk @OctopusEnergy Why is my standing charge 10p per day more expensive than yours?

New @OctopusEnergy Intel Go rates! 🤯 That’s half of what I’ve paid for the past year or so! HALF!!!

@DaleVince It would be quicker to re-nationalize the oil and gas industries.

More of the same stupidity - how do people with such a lack of critical thinking get to lead organisations like Renewable UK - or hold a senior role at Shell before that. Oh maybe there’s a clue in that back story. But look at these facts - first it will take maybe 5 years to produce oil and gas from new drilling in the North Sea - so it’s not coming any time soon. But second and most important - the global fossil fuel market sets the price for all the oil and gas we produce, no amount of production from our North Sea can save us a single penny. It’s a fact. Made here, priced globally. Gives us zero economic protection. Renewable UK should rein in this ex oil head or get a new leader. telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/…

@worstall @DaleVince And where would the additional tax income be spent 🤷

@DaleVince This is obviously nonsense. "no amount of production from our North Sea can save us a single penny." UK produced pays UK taxes, which saves us a pretty penny at the Treasury.

@DanNeidle gov.uk/government/pub…

Let's start with a mystery and a number. Here's HMRC's list of tax avoidance schemes they've "named" in the last three years. They add about 50 per year. Each is avoiding around £20m. So (*very* crudely) £1bn/year.

A small number of senior barristers are enabling large-scale tax fraud. They issue opinions saying tax schemes will work. They know they won't. The point of the opinion isn't to be right. It's to protect the shadowy individuals running the schemes from prosecution. 🧵