Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Valmy]

Oh they're very anti-coal which isn't really a big thing here anymore. They don't want to make choices.

Well clearly somebody is putting up solar and wind farms. Just not where the Greens are in power I guess. Where is the "imports" coming from?

[Sheilbh]

Well clearly somebody is putting up solar and wind farms. Just not where the Greens are in power I guess. Where is the "imports" coming from?

France, Benelux, Norway.

Wind is (broadly) solid. Lots of good off-shore wind. Although the Tories put a moratorium on on-shore wind in England Though I think Sunak relaxed that. The challenge with a lot of renewables is actually connecting it to the grid - particularly with the big off-shore projects.

[Valmy]

A good strategy is to co-locate big renewable projects with big loads if possible

Granted that works better in Texas where big oil drilling sites also happen to have great solar and wind resources.

I hope Labour are more chill when it comes to expanding renewables and the power grid.

[Josquius]

I have to say, solar farms in the UK don't sound like a very good idea.
Cover the country in wind turbines by all means. But massive solar projects just don't seem they'd be worthwhile in Britain?

A great example of what went wrong for Labour 2015-19

No idea who she is so can't comment.
I find it curious though she was not the candidate in 2019. Or did they pick someone wackier then?

[Sheilbh]

I'm not sure that it's about being chill as much as very, very urgent.

I always bang on about this but the last two years the lights have almost gone out over the winter and we've been helped by mild weather. We have an energy system that is running close to capacity.

According to the National Grid, in order to meet the government's net zero targets we need to build "more than 5 times the amount of electricity transmission infrastructure in the next 7 years, than has been built in the past 30 years" (that was in 2023). Labour plan to move the government's targets forwards by five years to completely decarbonise the grid by 2030.

In addition, currently the average wait time to connect a renewables project to the grid is about 5 years - there are hundreds of built and generating renewable projects that are simply not connected. The National Grid has a strategy to get that down to six months which is good, but we really need it. The average time it takes to build power lines in the UK: 14 years. They have a strategy to halve that (but see above on how long we have to hit current targets) - one of the issues here is very strong local opposition to pylons so a lot of power infrastructure has to go underground.

I think there has been an awful lot of focus on having "stretching" targets that are "binding in law", or net zero commitments "enshrined in law" by all parties (SNP are part of this too) and far, far too little on the basic, boring, not very green seeming stuff of building power lines and connections and substations.

[HVC]

Are the connections and projects built concurrently and the 5 year average connection is just longer then the average project time, or do they build projects and then try to connect it to the grid once complete?

[Sheilbh]

Are the connections and projects built concurrently and the 5 year average connection is just longer then the average project time, or do they build projects and then try to connect it to the grid once complete?

They're separate - in part I believe it's because there is such high demand from renewables projects to connect them to the grid. There's loads of companies building renewables projects and one National Grid. As you'd expect - there is a queue system I think the energy regulator has just approved National Grid's proposal to reform that. I read about it but I can't remember how.

On the debate: Sunak is very annoying (and he did this with Truss too, and lost those debates).

[Valmy]

The average time it takes to build power lines in the UK: 14 years. They have a strategy to halve that (but see above on how long we have to hit current targets) - one of the issues here is very strong local opposition to pylons so a lot of power infrastructure has to go underground.

Underground is very expensive and has all sorts of reliability issues.

Sure you can hear out the locals and their opposition but at the end of the day the lines have to be built.

[HVC]

Are the connections and projects built concurrently and the 5 year average connection is just longer then the average project time, or do they build projects and then try to connect it to the grid once complete?

They're separate - in part I believe it's because there is such high demand from renewables projects to connect them to the grid. There's loads of companies building renewables projects and one National Grid. As you'd expect - there is a queue system I think the energy regulator has just approved National Grid's proposal to reform that. I read about it but I can't remember how.

That seems inefficient

[HVC]

The average time it takes to build power lines in the UK: 14 years. They have a strategy to halve that (but see above on how long we have to hit current targets) - one of the issues here is very strong local opposition to pylons so a lot of power infrastructure has to go underground.

Underground is very expensive and has all sorts of reliability issues.

Sure you can hear out the locals and their opposition but at the end of the day the lines have to be built.

Where have you been in this thread? At the end of the day nothing has to be built in the UK

It rhymes, so it must be true

[Josquius]

Watching the debate randomly. It's quite painful. Shouldn't be happening really.
Sunak keeps pushing this whole "Starmer is obsessed with the past. Forget about the last 14 years. I'm looking at the future".
Like.
What.
So I'm Gareth Southgate picking the England squad for the euros.
Who do I want up front? Harry Kane with his great past record?... Or Rishi Sunak. Who knows. Maybe he knows how to kick a ball.

[Sheilbh]

Incidentally on Farage immigration - I saw this by Ed Conway (of the brilliant Material World) on how big the shift is on immigration historically - and that it's actually overwhelmingly legal migration:

Ed Conway
@EdConwaySky
The chart I can't quite get out of my head is this one👇
Population-adjusted net migration since 1855(!)
We've NEVER seen net migration flows like this before.
Whether you put it down to post-Brexit migration rules, post-Covid shifts or something else, it's an ENORMOUS shift...

I'm quite surprised the issue isn't even bigger this election.
Perhaps it's because it takes a while for data trends to become a cultural issue.
Think Polish plumbers, post-war Commonwealth migration or Windrush generation.
The recent flows from India/Nigeria dwarf all those...
Cumulative immigration to UK since 2021:
India: 670k
Nigeria: 310k
China: 274k
Pakistan: 166k
HK: 131k
Ukraine: 108k
Even if u subtract students you're talking abt 301k from India & 103k from Nigeria.
Whatever your priors on migration, there's no disputing these are BIG numbers.
Oh and here's a cut-out-and-keep chart for the next time you hear someone claim the real issue at hand here is small boats 👇
It's really not.
Yes, small boats numbers are certainly up. But they're utterly dwarfed by other types of legal immigration.

And seeing it in the historical context made me think if that's part of the far-right and young people thread and the discussion of European parties "addressing" immigration or not. I suspect there's similar charts in other European countries.

One thing I just wondered is whether parties are addressing it as an issue and a policy problem, and I wonder if part of the sense of not "addressing" is that it slightly misses the bigger context which is that Europe has gone from being an emigration continent (mainly to the Americas) to an immigration continent.

I think a lot of rhetoric around this in the UK is just imported from America - "we are a nation of immigrants", or "immigrants built this country". There's some truth to it especially in the last century but actually there has been a shift - and it is nowhere near as true as is the case in the US. And worth noting that based on the last census the UK has a higher proportion of immigrants than the US at about 15% to the US 13.5% or so - I think that's true of other European countries who are even higher (Sweden and Germany, at least).

I just wonder if part of politicians not "addressing" immigration is that they're not talking about that fundamental point of Europe moving from being a society that produces emigrants to a society that attracts immigrants (which generally reflects really good things), but is a change people are aware of? Instead it's addressed as discrete groups or visa types or specific rules? And, in part, because that's not been addressed we don't have the language to talk about what European immigration societies look like and are - which is why we so often adopt the framing from the US?

[HVC]

1% doesn't seem like a lot. Also, you all flocking to America until the early 1900s probably skews the numbers a bit. Not the net flow exactly, but the appearance of people entering.

Also, Indians are everywhere kind of wonder if they're the number one immigrant to most western countries? I even hear Portuguese people mentioning the influx of Indian immigrants. I guess goa might be a reason, but never really thought of Indian immigration to Portugal before. 

[Barrister]

1% doesn't seem like a lot. Also, you all flocking to America until the early 1900s probably skews the numbers a bit. Not the net flow exactly, but the appearance of people entering.

Also, Indians are everywhere kind of wonder if they're the number one immigrant to most western countries? I even hear Portuguese people mentioning the influx of Indian immigrants. I guess goa might be a reason, but never really thought of Indian immigration to Portugal before. 

1% per year, every year, is absolutely a lot of immigration.  It's about the same rate we're taking immigrants (400,000 per year in a nation of 39 million).

[Sheilbh]

1% doesn't seem like a lot. Also, you all flocking to America until the early 1900s probably skews the numbers a bit. Not the net flow exactly, but the appearance of people entering.

But isn't the point that actually it's not just an abstract or the number but the change and it's pace - which is significant. It's not just the early 1900s but basically as far back as we can reliably go more people left the UK than entered, which has changed in the last few decades and very significantly in recent years. As I say I think that's possibly a common European experience.

And not just America, also Canada and the ten pound Poms to Australia etc.

I think you actually see it quite rawly in Ireland - which is having a debate on immigration at the minute - because the experience of emigration there is so profound that the change is really pronounced.

Also, Indians are everywhere kind of wonder if they're the number one immigrant to most western countries? I even hear Portuguese people mentioning the influx of Indian immigrants. I guess goa might be a reason, but never really thought of Indian immigration to Portugal before. 

It wouldn't surprise me if India was number one - I mean purely from their population it's probably likely.

But yeah Goa, Daman and Diu - I could be wrong but I'd guess that's a significant proportion of Indian migrants in Portugal.