"Some of the modelling we have suggests that you could get to a position by 2030 where if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be the same as where they are today because of the increase in non-commodity costs."
Fixed costs are enormous and are increasingly driven by paying for the CFDs that back up the economics of wind. The CFD scheme allows wind producers to de-risk from market prices by locking in a fixed price with the government who then recover this from bills.
So, yes you get to enjoy low variable costs when it's windy, but you pay for the priviledge year round.
I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy.
Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.
> I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy.
Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.
The CfDs set a floor price when there’s lots electricity being generated by renewables but they also contribute to bills when the market price is over the strike price
Electricity bills are higher because we’ve had two fossils fuel shocks in the last 5 years and the costs for decarbonisation are added to electricity bills rather than gas ones
The amount wind farms in the UK have contributed back over the last ten years is a rounding error compared to how much they have received. It's not even close: https://x.com/7Kiwi/status/2031657347433603581
And the scary thing: the wind farms aren't even making that much money! Some projects have been cancelled and others had to re-bid in subsequent auctions to get a higher CFD price than they originally received because they couldn't make the economics work. Worse, there are reasons to believe they're not even fully provisioning for their end-of-life decommissioning costs.
The UK's energy policy is unbelievably destructive :(
He explains on his website where he gets his data from. He gets it from The Low Carbon Contracts Company... y'know: the firm who is the actual counterparty to the CFDs and so should probably know the actual sums of cash being moved - and in which direction.
And note: even when gas is more expensive than the CFDs, the huge fixed and/or policy costs (network build-out, capacity market, curtailment, etc) are devastating.
The story would be completely different if wind farms were actually cheap to build and run... the problem is they're just not.
I wish it were not so... it would be great if we had a path to being free of dependence on hydrocarbons. But in a battle between wishful thinking and physical and economic reality, reality usually wins.
So we're faced with a choice as a nation: continue to pour tens of billions of pounds down this drain... or call time on the experiment and free up all that money for something productive?
Thanks… I’ll have a read through though I’m highly skeptical of anyone who’s a member of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union… it says a lot about their political leanings
Cheers. No doubt there's additional nuance I've missed but I'm fairly certain he's directionally correct. And, if he is, we face some dire consequences as a nation.
Re the Free Speech Union, that's an interesting one and perhaps points to a broader point. It often feels to me that there can often be an asymmetry of risk faced by participants in some highly charged debates. I know this is a cliche, but there is definitely something to the adage that "conservatives think progressives are stupid, but progressives think conservatives are evil".
So it doesn't surprise me at all that the FSU was founded by somebody from that 'side': If you're debating in an environment when some (I stress some) of the people who may read your writings may actually think you're evil, as opposed to just wrong, it seems rational to invest in some protection?
In any case, I don't know Turver, but I have no reason to believe he's making this stuff up. He seems pretty rational to me, and does share his working. I'd urge you to remain open minded to the (scary) possibility he's right.
This seems the most likely way it works. Which makes me unsympathetic to publishers who complain about it. Digital distribution will always have this issue. Substack goes from strength to strength because they don't give an inch on the paywall.
I would believe those are some of the better options and definitely a useful benchmark.
1. How do you go about finding the "absolute" best when you go to a city
2. What does this have to do with the GP's question?
Yeah, influential Tories are likely to get jobs when a Tory government is in power. Much like how Seamus Milne will become the Corbyn's press officer come a labour win in June.
>Le Roux admitted that he had created the encryption software E4M but denied that he had developed TrueCrypt, its famous progeny.
To me the picture that is being painted is that Truecrypt was a project funded by criminals and maintained by people associated with organised crime.
Yet we still don't know what happened in 2014 that ended the project and the circumstances in how they 'gassed' their canary. Was it something to do with Le Roux's informing? Was it connected to the Snowden revelations?
It was ridiculous that the author even brought it up. The privacy-aware and technologist audiences will be smart enough to see that he in no way connected Le Roux to Truecrypt in the whole series. The others will mentally connect "mass murdering, drug lord" to "Truecrypt" due to repetition. This image will be the one they hear the likes of Comey say in public media where encryption is the tool of thugs and must be backdoored/squashed. The author is doing a disservice to both Truecrypt and encryption in general by constantly trying to tie it in.
It should've been mentioned in the beginning with his E4M work and then later in the follow-up question. That's it unless the author has more evidence with a solid or highly-probable tie-in to Truecrypt.
What do you mean? It was explained on part 2 that the code for TrueCrypt was built on top of E4M.
"I asked him what he meant, and Hafner told me that in the middle of the development work for DriveCrypt, he discovered that Le Roux was still working on E4M and had incorporated some of his work for SecurStar into his personal project.
(...)
In 2004, a group of anonymous developers did exactly what Hafner had feared: They released a new and powerful, free file-encryption program, called TrueCrypt, built on the code for E4M. “TrueCrypt is based on (and might be considered a sequel to)” E4M, a release announcement stated."
It was. It also has almost nothing to do with anything in the whole series. It should've been one fact in isolation about one part of Le Roux's history. Instead, the author keeps dropping lines about Truecrypt as if to tie Le Roux's name to it and imply he's been behind its funding or shutdown. Without evidence. Repeatedly.
He's better off just leaving it off except the E4M-Truecrypt beginning and the question in court. It wasn't relevant to anything else unless I'm overlooking something. THe rest of the article is about pharmacies, call centers, hitmen, and so on. Nothing to do with TrueCrypt.
I don't agree with your view. The author briefly mentioned the relation E4M-Truecrypt only 2 times as it found some kind of evidence or relation between those two projects. And it is valid as the involvement of Le Roux in the Somalia wars, for example.
I don't feel the author is milking any of it to make the article more interesting.
I get why you're saying it and all. It's just that this article really plays on the E4M-Truecrypt connection and jumps between Le Roux and its story. See here:
The Hacker News comments and title showed many were already thinking a grand reveal was forthcoming of how Le Roux was financing Truecrypt all this time. It keeps getting mentioned even though it has nothing to do with Le Roux's life or story post E4M. Here's an alternative that's more accurate for the significance of Truecrypt to the story:
The original paragraphs on E4M and Truecrypt spinoff stay. After sentence "...message boards for good," the author stops talking about Truecrypt entirely. He should mention PhoneCrypt offer in isolation as it was significant. Later on, might mention for the trial question the context that some people suspected Le Roux might have funded or worked on Truecrypt all this time. Then show he was asked, said yes for E4M, and no for Truecrypt. Then move on.
I mean, there's not much reason to talk so much about Truecrypt, Snowden's view of it, and so on if there's nothing tying Le Roux to Truecrypt. That someone built on his work and it turned into a solid tool would be enough to say. The only good thing I could think of is that the author is trying to encourage people to use Truecrypt and such strong, OSS encrypt by embedding it into his piece. That would be annoying but justifiable in a greater good sense. Still not relevant to Paul Le Roux, though, past fork of E4M without evidence he was behind Truecrypt.
I'm not sure there's a need for the author to be trying to encourage the audience to do anything. A central theme of the story is building Le Roux up to seem as big/talented/accomplished as possible. Things like the fact that he has logging and mining concerns are brought up repeatedly despite them not being directly related to him getting busted for meth, but they serve to keep you thinking "this guy is achieving a lot". You can pick it even from the title of the series.
Truecrypt is very well known amongst tech literate people and Snowden at least is well known amongst the rest. By repeatedly driving home the fact that Le Roux was responsible for the foundation of this software, it makes him seem more impressive in the readers mind.
I could see that. Yet, Truecrypt and its successes were some other group's work. He just made essentially the prototype that had enough functionality to give them a head start. In its original form, it wouldn't have achieved all the stuff described for Truecrypt in the article.
So, saying he made E4M that others' turned into Truecrypt... then dropping Truecrypt... is more honest if we're talking his accomplishments. Not Truecrypt developers' accomplishments.
"Some of the modelling we have suggests that you could get to a position by 2030 where if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be the same as where they are today because of the increase in non-commodity costs."
Fixed costs are enormous and are increasingly driven by paying for the CFDs that back up the economics of wind. The CFD scheme allows wind producers to de-risk from market prices by locking in a fixed price with the government who then recover this from bills.
So, yes you get to enjoy low variable costs when it's windy, but you pay for the priviledge year round.
I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy.
Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.
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