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Did you guys all try the Electricity Calculator, available from the BBC article Jérôme links to?

I came up with this (seemed obvious, as the insulation option is costly).

by Alex in Toulouse on Sun Apr 2nd, 2006 at 11:28:58 AM EST
The insulation option is costly, but a great deal of the cost is labour, in other words, a programme of house insulation to reduce energy consumption = a lot of jobs over quite a long period.

The real lesson of that game, anyway, is that electricity isn't going to be cheap.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Sun Apr 2nd, 2006 at 04:24:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]
The cost of actually building all British houses to a reasonable standard of insulation would probably increase housing prices substantially, too. But it would save everyone a bunch in gas and electricity.

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Apr 2nd, 2006 at 04:27:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]
This was my result. I went for reducing demand as much as possible: the £600+ per household can be partly subsidized by the government to provide insulations for the poorest households, as (like afew argues) that would be subsidizing industry and labour.

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Apr 2nd, 2006 at 04:35:02 PM EST
[ Parent ]
The calculator seems vapid to the point of stupidity though.

Nuclear has significant carbon costs during construction, fuelling and clean-up - unless uranium fuel is mined on-site. So pretending that nuclear is carbon-free is just plain wrong.

Renewables also have a carbon cost, for similar reasons, but obviously it's a very much smaller one.

It also would have been interesting to see what X thousand windmills or Y nuclear power stations would have meant for the UK's available development space.

And microgeneration could have had a mention too.

(And so on.)

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Sun Apr 2nd, 2006 at 06:21:39 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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