So, so English. The country that doubled down on unbelievably ugly architecture and unbelievably ugly top-down urban planning for decades, to the point they mocked Charles for encouraging more traditional 'village' style developments, has decided it would be best to top down require solar panels. Not incentivize energy efficiency. Not even incentivizing solar, which worked extremely well in Germany. Just some good old predicted-by-Orwell central government decision making.
It's not even clear absolute success would be a net good for English energy. I know almost nothing about English energy, except that it delivers a very expensive product to its customers. In my ignorance, I'd be willing to bet that if England deployed, say, 88GW of solar (Germany's rough numbers), we would be reading about English energy companies requiring bailouts, and then likely increased per kwh charges, given how the regulation / economic management seems to work.
Comments below say that it's 100k GBP to add heat pumps to homes, which I am very, very surprised by. In the Pacific Northwest where I live, a heat pump retrofit is on the order of $18k or 13k GBP. American power costs roughly 1/3 what English power costs on average, and I get that there's therefore a larger savings incentive, and therefore more profit available to installers, but this seems egregious. Y'all, what's happening over there?
It's not even clear absolute success would be a net good for English energy. I know almost nothing about English energy, except that it delivers a very expensive product to its customers. In my ignorance, I'd be willing to bet that if England deployed, say, 88GW of solar (Germany's rough numbers), we would be reading about English energy companies requiring bailouts, and then likely increased per kwh charges, given how the regulation / economic management seems to work.
Comments below say that it's 100k GBP to add heat pumps to homes, which I am very, very surprised by. In the Pacific Northwest where I live, a heat pump retrofit is on the order of $18k or 13k GBP. American power costs roughly 1/3 what English power costs on average, and I get that there's therefore a larger savings incentive, and therefore more profit available to installers, but this seems egregious. Y'all, what's happening over there?