📊**The "LCOE is misleading" megathread **📊

When I write about electricity prices, one of the most common comebacks is a link to some form of LCOE report that says wind and solar are insanely cheap.

Let’s break down what it leaves out, and why it misleads on renewables. 🧵 1️⃣Levelised Cost of Electricity is the average lifetime cost per unit from a power source.

Add up all costs to build & run a generator and divide by total expected MWh produced. Simple, right? It’s been used for decades to compare power sources on an “equal” basis

💰The Cost of Renewables 2025 Megathread💰

The Government is pushing the narrative that renewables are cheap and gas is the problem. It's been 18 months since my last thread showed this to be a lie.

Have things changed? Or is Ed Miliband driving us towards ruin? 🧵 1️⃣ We are constantly being fed the same lies.

🔹Renewables are the cheapest
🔹Prices are high because gas sets the market
🔹Solar is the cheapest form of electricity
🔹Labour will drop bills £300

All of it is nonsense. I'll show you why.

1️⃣2️⃣ The Renewables Obligation scheme, closed to new entrants in 2017, continues to impact energy bills significantly. Costs are projected to peak around 2028, with the scheme's burden not clearing until 2037, adding substantial charges to consumers' electricity bills. 1️⃣3️⃣ Last, and most expensive, is the Feed-in Tariff (FiT). Running from 2009 to 2019 with 20 year contracts, although the first 2 years have 25 year contracts. FiT is for sub 5MW projects which by quantity is mostly rooftop solar PV. This generates 7% of all renewables.

The Great Carbon Rip-off

The UK's planned alignment with EU-ETS is a grave economic mistake that will hit every household and business. Higher carbon prices will drive up electricity costs, fuel inflation, and by 2027, increase heating and transport costs. 🧵 1⃣ The EU carbon market (EU-ETS) already commands prices of €80-90 per tonne of CO2 - significantly higher than the UK's current system (which was £31 in Jan). Alignment means adopting these higher carbon costs, immediately driving up electricity prices across Britain.

Pensions - The solution

The current average pension liability for someone retiring today, adjusted for 3.2% triple lock increases over 20 years, is £315,500 per person.

We could make that roughly £9,500 per person if we change the end we pay to the start. 🧵

https://twitter.com/LoftusSteve/status/1905206405021208834

If for every child born today the Government paid £9,500 into the "Great Britain Pension Fund", a fully ring fenced and invested fund, this would cover the full pension liability for that child to retire at age 68.

That amount in 68 years would be £940k.

We need to have an uncomfortable conversation about pensions.

It was introduced in 1909, but it wasn't until 1950 that the average life crossed the threshold.

Now we live nearly 20% of our lives above the state pension age, and growing. Had we stayed in line with 1980, the state pension age should now be 73 years old.

The average person does not contribute anywhere near enough in tax to cover 20% of their life in retirement. So we are taxing it out of the young.

The left are so pompously dislikeable.

Nobody on the right does this. When Labour won I didn't see any serious conservative voices writing long "woe is me" tweets about how the world was a darker place and doom and gloom was imminent.

They are all such self righteous pricks.

https://twitter.com/CarolineLucas/status/1854101283583443399

Example #2

https://x.com/EdwardJDavey/status/1854078061970407860

🙊 The Common Disinformation Megathread 🙊

Last year the House of Commons Library published a document designed to brief MPs on the basics of renewable energy pricing.

It's a pack of lies that's regularly used across the RE sector. I'll show you how. 1️⃣ The commons document makes the following points,

🔸Gas sets the price for renewables
🔸Renewables are the cheapest in the merit order
🔸That renewable prices are falling

Let me explain why that's nonsense, but first, the link.

commonslibrary.parliament.uk/why-is-cheap-r…

This is the real story today. This isn't Blair '97. Nobody is moving to Labour.

Conservative voters stayed home

Kingswood 2019 - 16,492 votes for labour
Kingswood 2024 - 11,176 votes for labour

Wellingborough 2019 - 13,737 labour votes
Wellingborough 2024 - 13,844 labour votes This is what happens when you don't do Conservative things.

💰The Cost of Renewables Megathread💰

The popular narrative in UK politics, and subsequently social media, is that renewables are cheap and drive bills down while gas is the problem driving prices up.

This is propaganda designed to make you buy in. 1⃣ You could be forgiven for thinking that the following points are facts as they are repeated often enough.

🔸Renewables are 9x cheaper than gas
🔸Renewables are bringing prices down
🔸Solar is the cheapest form of electricity
🔸Wind is cheap, especially onshore

All lies.

I'm very tired of seeing this fake map made for morons. So I made a more accurate version that reflects reality.

First you can see Palestine never existed. It was part of Ottoman Syria for 400 years before the British and covered 3 different administrative districts. Then in the 2nd map from 1920 to 1946 there were no "Jewish Settlements" it was just British Mandatory Palestine. Some Jewish people lived there, some ethnic Syrians, some Jordanians, some Lebanese, some Egyptians and some native Bedouin tribes.

1⃣ There is no bigger lie than Palestinians are an oppressed people and it's all Israel's fault.

They may be oppressed, but it's largely their own fault.

A Dummies Guide I put together as I was a Dummy until recently. 2⃣Firstly, there is no Palestine. The name did not exist until Roman occupation when after the defeats of the Jews they renamed Judea as Paleastina. When the Ottoman empire ruled it the whole area was Ottoman Syria.

It wasn't until the British Mandate that the state was created.

1⃣ This is the clip that most enraged me on the BBC's heatpump show last night.

It's starts off by shitting on SMR costs. The whole point of SMR is they have a very good idea of costs from building modular reactors for defense.

But it's the Hinkley lies that got me. 2⃣ The program spent enormous amount of time talking about how onshore wind was the cheapest form of electricity. No mention of subsidies. No mention of balancing costs.

But when it gets to nuclear it's being "subsidised by £19bn".

Pure nonsense.

This is London air quality at 9am on a Monday morning after peak rush hour.

It's better than Stoke. Can we stop pretending London air quality is bad and needs major intervention?

(Anything below 50 is good to WHO standards) For the "It's the school holidays people"

Its lower at the moment but is nowhere near even moderate quality on its worse days.

There's some rumours floating around today that the temperatures being reported on the news are not the traditional air temperatures we have always seen, but the much hotter ground temps.

I need to look into it more, but this would be a huge deception if true.

https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1681625398856040448

Reports like below seem to suggest that the European Space Agency has been providing ground temps and that is why they do not match the Weather station temps in the tweets above.

Needs more investigating.

https://twitter.com/wattsupwiththat/status/1681891723503345664?s=20

🇬🇧 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲𝗱 𝗪𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗠𝗲𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 🇬🇧

There has been much on Twitter recently about water privatisation in England and how everything would be so much better without the evils of capitalism.

But how true is that? 1⃣ For over 20 years water has been devolved. In this thread we're going to take a look at a number of available metrics to rank & compare each nation.

🔶Sewage monitoring and hours per head
🔶Bathing water quality
🔶Drinking water quality
🔶Average bills
🔶Leaks per head

🍃 The Offshore Wind Megathread 🍃

How many times have you seen on TV or read on Twitter that wind power is cheap and that's where the Government should focus its efforts?

Let's have a look at why that isn't remotely true.

#windenergy #greenenergy #renewables @BrknMan @aDissentient @7Kiwi MW not GW, it's late.

A 🧵 on how our biases and lack of knowledge compound misinformation and re-enforce incorrect views.

The 🌊𝗠𝗲𝗴𝗮 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱🌊 from last week led me to some interesting discussions and John West has been kind enough to agree to me using one of his own as a reference. 1️⃣ John is a moderate centre left guy and if you follow me and want to stretch your bubble he's worth a follow.

On Sunday John made a reasonable statement querying if something is a lie or not. This leads to a goldmine of misinformation.

https://twitter.com/JohnWest_JAWS/status/1660192142516445184

🌊 𝗨𝗞 𝗪𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗠𝗲𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 🌊

Twitter and the media is awash with lies, half truths and misconceptions about the state of UK rivers, sewage overflows and water privatisation.

It's a complicated topic, it's going to be a long 🧵 1️⃣ Many reading this will think that the following points are true

🔸 UK waters are worse than ever
🔸 EU water is much better
🔸 Tories voted to dump sewage
🔸 It happened after Brexit
🔸 It's due to privatisation

All of these are wrong. I'll show you why.

Why the UK economy is in a bad way in a single chart.

This is UK public spending by year onto which I've overlaid some trend lines.

You can see that during the 80's and 90's under the Tories UK spending each year grew moderately in line with GDP. 🧵/1 Then in 1997 there are 13 years of massive spending increases way above GDP growth. From 32% of GDP in 1997 to 42% of GDP in 2010.

The Tories flat lined spending to let the economy catch up with "not really austerity". and it was down to sub 39% pre pandemic. /2

Good news! There is no "70% more infectious" strain and the evidence is there for anyone that wants to look to find (I'm talking to you media).

Below is a graph comparing London and the South East with the recent wave in the North East. /1 It's clear to see that the uptick in London and the SE is worse, and action did need to be taken, but it's not worse to the point that it says "70% more infectious" when you factor in 60%+ of London cases are the new strain. The curve is very similar to the est wave 1 curve. /2