General > General Technical Chat
"Gas Armageddon": Energy/electricity prices in EU/UK (and how to deal with them)
james_s:
--- Quote from: tszaboo on August 24, 2022, 10:30:13 pm ---I have a chimney, and an open fireplace, and maybe I'll consider buying a chainsaw, there is plenty of trees around. Though you are also already too late to cut down trees, it needs months to dry out. Apparently deforestation is an issue back in the old country.
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An open fireplace is virtually useless for heating, I have heard in some cases it is a net negative since most of the heat goes up the flue and then it continues to draw heat out of the house after the fire dies down before you can close the damper. A sealed wood stove is lovely though, I installed an insert in one of my fireplaces years ago and I love it.
james_s:
--- Quote from: tom66 on August 25, 2022, 08:22:35 am ---Is the issue caused by speculation? Really?
Speculators make profit between the buy-sell spread; they attempt to profit from small changes in price. They do not generally profit from the price of the commodity itself, not for gas at least. This is because they don't usually store gas (that's expensive) and they don't produce it. So if the hypothesis that this high gas price is caused by speculation, then where is all of this storage, holding gas back from the market?
The "Don't Pay" campaign is silly. I understand that people are struggling and they may simply be unable to pay. However, the energy retailers, the companies who buy energy for their customers on the wholesale market, don't make a huge amount of money in any typical year. In a good year they'd make £25 per customer for a gas and electric contract, for a whole year. They're already making a loss at the current SVR tariff because the wholesale price has jumped even further ahead of the capped price, at least for the UK. The anger is directed at the wrong people and risks further collapse of the energy retail market and higher costs for all.
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That's typical unfortunately. About 10 years or so ago when gasoline first topped $2/gallon there was a rash of incidents where bricks were thrown through windows of gas stations and other crimes of that sort. The gas stations of course weren't the issue, they don't make much profit at all on the gas.
james_s:
--- Quote from: tom66 on August 25, 2022, 10:22:05 am ---Right, but you also can't allow Russia to invade a sovereign democratic country. So the sanctions are justified there, it is just that the EU cannot survive long without Russian gas, so it creates a dilemma. You can support Ukraine and have cold homes and shut down industry, or allow Ukraine to fall to the Russians and admit that Russia has too much control over European energy to make any retaliatory action practical in the long term.
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Why can't you? I think it's pretty crappy what Russia is doing, but that doesn't make it yours or my duty to get involved and dictate what one sovereign nation does to another. It's pretty hard to tell Russia what to do, and there isn't much the rest of the world is going to be able to do to persuade them short of starting WWIII. I suspect the sanctions will have a negligible effect on Russia, all they are really doing is causing suffering in the countries imposing them.
james_s:
--- Quote from: tautech on August 25, 2022, 12:22:13 pm ---Problem is unless you’re near a plate boundary or volcano land isn’t growing on trees so rightfully what we have need be used wisely. From what we see the UK has mainly hamlets throughout the countryside in the effort to protect the productive farmland from senseless subdivision whereas here close to cities housing is expanding horizontally instead of vertically in some effort to protect the productive countryside.
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This is a big problem in my region. Over the past decades we have paved/built over millions of acres of prime agricultural land. People love to crap on the rural regions, but forget that's where the bulk of our food comes from.
Marco:
In the lead up to the war, Putin never really cared about NATO buffers or even an impending invasion of Donbas (or biolabs). The closest Putin came to a Casus Belli was ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“. Now consider that Russia already said, "Baltic states’ treatment of Russians reminiscent of true apartheid". They consider all Russified/Russian empire nations theirs to bully and unfortunately, we already made some of them NATO and EU members.
Coming out on the side of Ukraine had a Real Politik purpose. If you want to be really callous you could say Ukraine has served its purpose, but there was a purpose.
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