Spontaneous ride along the Kent coast to scope out taking a bunch of students on a trip to a wind farm. Obligatory end of trip fish n chips on the beach was top tier.

In this week's Energy Institute blog, Max Auffhammer's highly entertaining and also very serious take on redesigning electricity bills so customers can actually understand them. An important step in enabling demand flexibility. energyathaas.wordpress.com/2025/12/01/a...

We are looking for expressions of interest for The Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship scheme. We welcome proposals from exceptional scholars in economics and the social sciences working on topics aligned with our research themes in climate change, environment, and sustainable development.

Kind of depressing how divorced a lot of this from the actual research process. Like producing a simulacrum of a paper is the same as "doing research".

"If growth was actually your priority, you would not be doing this." (Me, stating the obvious) www.ft.com/content/2b60...

It's grid connection reform queue day in the UK! 🔌💡 NESO (the grid operator) has published the results of their efforts to unclog the process for connecting new power supply to the grid. Over 700GW of proposed projects have been slimmed down to prioritise 130GW by 2030 and a further 150GW by 2035.

Surprising precisely nobody, more CCS plans delayed/abandoned. This is a technology that is just forever overpromising and underdelivering.

AI-enabled NIMBYism has come to clean energy deployment. Virtually all the examples mentioned in this piece are wind, solar and transmission projects. 💡🔌

To be clear, this is a tariff on our own exports. Yes, it will raise money - tariffs do. The question is whether it will also cut exports from one of our core economic strengths- HE.

What If Utilities Just Made Less Money? A question that's right up there with "why do we regulate utilities like it's still 1920?"

#Nuclear energy's capacity to help Britain meet its net-zero targets makes it attractive. But do the high cost and complicated logistics of building new plants and the emergence of renewable alternatives, make it unviable? Shefali Khanna and @stephenjarvis.bsky.social for @lsebr.bsky.social #COP30

Exactly! What is this entire policy for? It’s not like they have some huge manifesto mandate they are leaning on here. Who actually voted for this?

Great piece from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com on the increasingly top-heavy nature of UK taxation. Valuable new context for the notion that Brits want Scandanavian style public services with US tax rates. All the more worrying that widely trailed broad-based rises in income tax have now been abandoned.

Literally one of the few things that seemed like it might happen and would be a good addition to the budget, ideally alongside some broader efforts to reform vehicle taxation. The courage of this government knows no bounds.

Good news! I had thought I'd read somewhere that heat pump subsidies might be on the chopping block but good to see that actually air-to-air is being brought into the scheme.

Unashamedly stoked for this 🔌💡

Really enjoyed this interview. Southgate always does come across as a decent, thoughtful guy, which aren't traits that immediately spring to mind when thinking about the upper echelons of the footballing world.

It appears we have reached the "let's put data centers in space" phase of the AI boom/bubble (delete as appropriate).

Excellent conference - 100% recommend!

New Energy Institute Blog Post: Spreading the Cap-and-Trade Wealth - @severinborenstein.bsky.social energyathaas.wordpress.com/2025/11/10/spreading-the-cap-and-trade-wealth/ #climatechange #electricity #energyefficiency #naturalgas #solar

The evidence keeps accumulating that Brexit was an astonishing self-inflicted economic policy disaster. The fact that it is a slow-moving one bodes ill for those who think that populist economic mismanagement will translate into voters punishing populists. www.nber.org/system/files...

Look at the distribution of z-values from medical research!

Wonderfully pedantic letter in today’s @financialtimes.com

"The combined upfront cost of the five-year Global Talent Visa ... and the Immigration Health Surcharge ... amounts to £5,941. ... This compares with average upfront fees of £275 across 14 other countries for similar visa schemes." UK visa fees are absurdly high and utterly self-defeating.

Great article on what sounds like a farcical construction project. I will be sure to avoid the sidewalk on this particular block whenever I'm next in NYC.

These policy costs should be removed from electricity bills and funded via general taxation. Immediate ~15-20% price cut right there.

Putting aside the wisdom of newly elected Reform UK councils trying to block clean energy investment in their area, as predicted they actually have limited local powers to deliver on that promise when large projects (like this 700MW solar development) are signed off at the national level.

Grid scale batteries are changing our electricity system. Excellent new visual story on batteries in FT today shows just how far this technology has evolved. Fasten your seatbelts, this is just the beginning. ig.ft.com/mega-batteri...

Exciting opportunities to work with LSE's @gsos-lse.bsky.social Global School of Sustainability * Comms & Events Coordinator * Student Experience Officer * Assistant Prof in Biodiversity Economics, Dept of Geog & Env * Assistant Prof of Philosophy, Dept of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method

We're hiring! Environmental econ AP position with a focus on biodiversity and related topics. Come join our great community here at LSE, with lots of people working in the enviro econ space across campus. Deadline in just under 3 weeks (Oct 26th) and details here: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Monopoly_IRL

Worldwide solar and wind power generation has outpaced electricity demand this year, and for the first time on record, renewable energies combined generated more power than coal, according to a new analysis. share.google/FrLUSBkG5xrX... 🔌💡 #Upshift

Nice piece out today in the @nytimes.com that includes some coverage of our recent @pnas.org paper on air pollution and pets.

We're hiring! Environmental econ AP position with a focus on biodiversity and related topics. Come join our great community here at LSE, with lots of people working in the enviro econ space across campus. Deadline in just under 3 weeks (Oct 26th) and details here: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

The growth of Chinese EV and battery exports in the past few years is really something! 🔌💡

Call for papers and posters is open for #envecon2026. It is the UK's only premier applied environmental economics conference gathering research providers and users from academia, public and private sector. www.uknee.org.uk/envecon/enve...

New paper out in @pnas.org! We study the effect of air pollution on pets, finding increased vet admissions when air quality is worse. Tackling air pollution doesn't just matter for human health - it's important for animals too, including people's much loved cats and dogs www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper out in @pnas.org! We study the effect of air pollution on pets, finding increased vet admissions when air quality is worse. Tackling air pollution doesn't just matter for human health - it's important for animals too, including people's much loved cats and dogs www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Nice blog on data centers and electricity prices. Also that is a wild stat that one-third of worldwide hyperscale data centers are in Virginia! 🔌💡

Killed by the Net Zero Dad www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Why did Apple take a perfectly functional app for managing a music library (iTunes), that could also transfer directly to an iPhone, and break it up into a bunch of inferior apps that are buggy as hell and have less functionality?! Enshitification in action.

France’s 2022 nuclear outages showed how vital interconnectors are for grid stability 🇫🇷⚡ This year, as heatwaves strained 🇫🇷’s nuclear fleet, interconnectors helped France replace the missing capacity through imports. https://loom.ly/G1lrGlM

Just heard this paper being covered in @economist.com. A 50+% increase in incidence by midcentury is big. Was notable seeing growing concerns about the spread of mosquito-borne diseases when in France over the summer.

📢 Come and work with us! We're looking to recruit an Assistant Professor in Biodiversity Economics Application Deadline: 26 October 2025 More details here: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/12… Please share

It's weird - but now in Oslo, there's so many EVs that you notice the noise and the smell from individual ICE cars, and you realise how much we've been normalising it for ever. You can smell them half a street away. And inside parking lots are just *quiet*.

why economy bad? why not economy good for little while, where good economy go

LSE Environment Week 2025 is taking place from 22-25 September 🌎 🌱Working with partners across LSE and the world, this week will encourage economists from all fields to work on environmental issues and connect to policy change Register online now ➡️ www.lse-environment-week.com/environment-...

Striking stats in @suttontrust.bsky.social report cited by this piece. Dominance of private school / Oxbridge in media, government and law is really quite damning. Big drop for current cabinet vs previous one though, and hilarious that Oxbridge is apparently not an asset in the Scottish parliament

🌳Join us on September 22nd to launch the LSE Green Skills Lab that will produce academic research on the labour market dynamics of the green and digital twin transition and the development and evaluation of industrial policy to achieve a Just Transition.