Scrutable

bjn wrote: Sun Jan 18, 2026 4:27 pm Your assumption seems to be that it's cheaper to continue with business as usual than to adopt newer technologies that are lower carbon. B

I was careful not to say that. My post was description, not prescription, until the last sentence. And I carefully put the word "also" into my last sentence to avoid the implication you still read into it.

bjn wrote: Sun Jan 18, 2026 4:27 pm Wind power delivers £104bn net benefit to UK consumers

That is, sadly, a rather speculative quantification. It is made up of:

£14.2bn saving from lower electricity prices due to the wind in the market - can easily be quantified, this is probably right
£43.2bn cost from subsidies to wind power - can easily be quantified, this is probably right
£133.3bn saving from lower natural gas prices - a very big and in reality very uncertain number

And we learn the nature of the people who calculated that big and very uncertain number from the fact that they give it to 4sf and give no range of uncertainty around it.

I looked at the actual paper to see how these geographers had quantified that large but hard-to-calculate number, that contributes so much to the net savings. It is indeed speculative. It looks like the kind of thing shameless consultants do when forced to calculate a number for something that in reality is very hard to quantify. They don't even have scenarios for the things they don't really know. If I was forced to try and quantify this unquantifiable number, I would at least insist on protecting myself from "doesn't pass the laugh test" quantification, by having some very broad scenarios.

So I have been rude about this quantification. I'd better set out how they have done it and why it doesn't pass a laugh test. They start by saying, suppose none of Europe had ever built any wind energy, what would the price of gas be now. But there are three problems with this. First, is that really the correct counterfactual, that none of Europe built any wind energy? It seems rather arbitrary. And why not just Britain? That's the market they are computing this benefit for. That would substantially reduce the savings. Then there is data they use to say what the price of gas would be if the demand were increased by that amount, which is some statements by ACER, and relating in particular to judgments about Russian gas supplies. But then the really unknowable thing is what else would have happened in the world - for example development of gas fields around the world, development of additional nuclear power stations, etc - if Europe had never started building any wind farms.