This is brilliant from Will on the challenges facing NESO in trying to run the grid without gas.

Really enjoyed writing this, not least figuring out how much electricity you would need to pump into the North Sea to make it ever so slightly warmer...

Well, now all the fuss has died down we can all relax and enjoy @adambell.bsky.social on Labour's 2030 clean power mission www.politicshome.com/news/article...

A great day for cheap power enthusiasts as 5GW of solar comes in at £65/MWh and 1.3GW of onshore wind comes in at £72.24/MWh. Both prices are in £2024 and are below the wholesale price, meaning that these projects will cut costs. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/698a0d...

Happy to take the credit but frankly this is put far more eloquently than I have managed about why leaders aren't able to respond to what voters are asking for, because they can't without making some serious choices.

which way ageing Western environmentalist

Britain has 99 problems, but polite people who say thank you ain’t one. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I wish we had France’s problem of too much abundant clean energy.

When the Government decided to ban selling laughing gas in little bottles to reduce litter from people doing balloons in public places I said the net effect would be that people would keep doing balloons only with bigger canisters. Lo and behold, they're blowing up EFWs. www.ft.com/content/94aa...

Great thread. You can't have a high renewables and a high nuclear power system, unless you over-index on storage. You need to scale nuclear to a portion of always-on demand.

Not to go all Anti-Free Speech, but the guy who started this argument publicly was back on Question Time last week, and a prominent supporter of it has a decent chance of winning a by election. Those two facts are connected.

Its not a new sentiment but: Fuck Matt Goodwin. I have family members who'd dearly like to have kids, but can't due to medical stuff. Friends who have spent years trying but it hadnt happened. Multiple miscarriages. Fuck Goodwin and everyone who supports him.

i love european olympics opening ceremonies. the second the ioc names a european host city the prime minister calls the culture minister into their office and says "find me your strangest homosexuals. give each of them a period of our great nation's history, a kilo of cocaine, and Ten Million Euros"

Have to disagree with Stephen, mocking ambition at this scale is why the UK has failed to deliver on Bangor's potential.

If the Government continues to be too cowardly to seize these vessels, the least they could do is issue Letters of Marque to allow the glorious return of piracy to the Atlantic. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Or - a careerist mouser who couldn't cut it in the private sector pest control industry and whose long occupation of the same role is symptomatic of a 'rewards for failure' culture that is endemic in our public institutions.

The Government has launched a new programme for private nuclear facilities today, and I am bitterly disappointed that my plan for nuclear-powered cargo vessels won't be covered.

One of the big problems for marketeers such as myself is that people absolutely hate prices being used to indicate scarcity. Rent controls are exactly the same as calls for constraints on TicketMaster: requests to move towards a system of queuing for scarce products rather than money.

I'm being sued for libel by a man who ran a rental arbitrage scheme involving some of London's priciest properties. The Londoner have been brilliant in standing behind me & refusing to give into this naked attempt at silencing the truth. Read below - www.the-londoner.co.uk/the-londoner...

Mahmood reading Discipline & Punish and going, "Hey, this sounds awesome!"

AI tools are immensely powerful. The use of AI as a general purpose chat bot that is used like an encyclopaedia is the worst possible use of AI. AI is now, given good instructions from a knowledgeable user, capable of doing absolutely vast amounts of work extremely fast.

Dear @victoria-collins.bsky.social. As one of your constituents I would like to ask you remove your name from this letter. Rewarding people who failed to pay attention to what was going on in society manifestly runs against the principles I thought the Liberal Democrats held.

One of so many reasons I could not cut it in politics: I would not be able to bring myself to go “sorry, you needed…how many years notice to know when you needed to retire?”

If the MPs who signed the pro-WASPI letter to @patmcfaddenmp.bsky.social can't think of a better use for taxpayer money, they should not be in Parliament. The Ombudsman recommendation would spend £££ and satisfy noone. Should have taken a harder line 2 years ago.

Live your life in such a way that if you are murdered by thugs under colour of law because you had the gall to put yourself between them and a female neighbour they knocked down, an instant honour guard forms to show respect. ✊

This is a very good point in response to a @samfr.bsky.social post yesterday. Ministers and by extension officials need to see the whole policy waterfront - I can't help thinking that back in the day this was one of the purposes of Spads before they became more about media handling.

Clearly I am insufficiently online, as this to me says. "VOTE LAILA TO TURN LONDON INTO A FROSTPUNK DYSTOPIA."

By far the easiest way of doing this would be to scrap voluntary-exit first policies and when redundancies come up allowing managers to get rid of poor performers.

Why are birth rates collapsing, I idly wonder, as I heap yet another tax rise on younger adults that their elders didn’t have to pay, even as rents continue to rise. It’s truly a mystery for the ages. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

This is really excellent and anyone who cares about how government works should read it. I would particularly highlight the reference at the end to "giving ministers the tools to manage the regulatory state." /1

🧵 @jburnmurdoch.ft.com is spot on about the conditions in his FT piece. Liberal democracy held it together thanks to growth, good demographics, and the promise of a better future. Those days are gone, and that’s the "why" behind the erosion. However...

This is a very good, measured piece on why and immigration "liberals" often (but shouldn't) exaggerate/overegg the evidence on the positive impacts of immigration. (ignore the title) alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/the-uncomf...

Quick thread on how it is shocking the government has supressed this report, but it is equally shocking that anyone should be surprised by its contents. www.businessgreen.com/news/4524657...

AS @nilspratley.bsky.social highlights, giving public cash to a very successful company is an extremely odd move. If it's about encouraging a London listing, the Government could perhaps instead consider measures to make it easier to raise cash in London. www.theguardian.com/business/nil...

It’s not that America elected a despot. Lots of countries have done that. It’s that they RE-elected a despot. He showed them who he was during his first term. He showed them more of who he was during his time out of office. But they STILL voted him back in.

As ever, Private Eye sees through the way the usual-suspect media are happy to swallow wholesale and then amplify the BS from Tufton St lobbyists when it comes to net-zero And, as ever, @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org made all these points the moment the coverage landed

What has the modern Republican party done to stand up to evil?

I think most Ukrainians didn’t know his name until he died. But they sure as hell knew his work. What a tragedy kyivindependent.com/top-ukrainia...

So, US climbdown on Greenland as the end of global turmoil for now? Nope. Yesterday the EU in effect said China must agree to voluntarily hobble its own economy otherwise the WTO is dead. We are entering very dangerous territory indeed. So what is happening? (extract from EU paper below)

This explains why the world is, as of now, so very very dark.

Good line, but ultimately, "LOL you guys have to achieve consensus while we just have a king tell us what to do," is perhaps not the sick burn this American seems to think it is.

Hardened my view. The politically impossible thing to say is western carmakers are mostly dead in the water and blaming the regulation is easier because it’s forcing them to confront how terrible at innovation they are. Is ZEV bigger than trade barriers or energy prices, no.

@stephencollins.bsky.social is one of the greatest social and political commentators of the era. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

pretty sure he meant the other thing, grok, but very cool that those are your two things

For fans of the intricacies of the electricity market, and what we're going to do with all those old gas power stations, do give this a listen. linktr.ee/energyrevolu...

The Government's latest offshore wind auction results are published today - a colossal 8.4GW of projects at a headline price of £91.20/MWh(2024). Is this a good deal? /1 www.gov.uk/government/p...

Record breaking offshore wind auction results today! Whopping 8.4 GW of capacity secured. This is great news for keeping the clean power mission on target and making Britain a clean energy superpower. Quick thoughts and a few big BUT's 👇

1/ Some wild numbers have been used in the media this week for “the cost of net zero”. Reports have said that net zero will “cost” £4.5 trillion, £7.6 trillion – the list goes on. None of these are the cost of net zero – a quick explainer 🧵 on why

In what I can only describe as one of my favourite Christmas presents, DC Thomson have sent me a Desperate Dan comic entirely about smart meters. Wee Adam would've been thrilled by a bespoke Dandy, and Old Adam is thrilled by anything about smart energy data.

I think the key distinction for me is that we task people with a 2:1 in English Lit from Oxbridge to oversee our infrastructure projects whereas other countries put engineers in charge of engineering.