To save energy
‘To save energy, we won’t be putting your name in lights.
Search results for: energy
A crackdown on AI energy consumption would be a mistake
AI has an energy problem: it consumes an awful lot of it. Firms like ChatGPT creator OpenAI demand eye-watering levels of energy to develop their models. Training Chat GPT-3 used as much as 120 American homes over the course of a year, according to one study, while the training of GPT-4 used many multiples more. The
Unreliable renewables will make energy more costly
It is of course good news that the Ofgem price cap for a dual fuel household bill will fall from £1,928 to £1,690 from April (that is the bill paid by the average householder). It means that there should be strong downwards pressure on inflation (the Consumer Prices Index) in April. Barring a jolt in
Smart money: how to use less energy and save on your bills
Friday 28th April 2023, 12:00pm Many of us have seen our bills spiral in the last year, with our energy security particularly precarious this past winter. But securing our energy isn’t just about securing supply – managing demand is the other side of the equation. Could you take control of your energy usage and save
The problem with nationalising energy
Is nationalisation the vote-winner which Keir Starmer believes it to be? We will find out in due course, but my hunch is that the British public as a whole care a lot less about who owns the train carriages they ride in and the power stations which generate their electricity than Labour MPs do. No
Confessions of an energy drink addict
So 2022 bowed out with one last surprise. Who can honestly say they had ‘crowds queueing outside Aldi at 5 a.m. for a viral energy drink’ on their bingo card? The must-have product in question is Prime, a caffeine-free energy drink created by YouTube influencers Logan Paul and KSI. Since going on sale in the
The imaginative energy of Katherine Mansfield
A hundred years ago, in a former Carmelite monastery 60 kilometres south of Paris, Katherine Mansfield ran up a flight of stairs to her bedroom and died of a haemorrhage. She was 34 years old. She had known for five years that she had tuberculosis. After joining the spiritualist therapeutic community at Fontainebleau-Avon in October
Claire Coutinho is a revealing choice as Energy Secretary
Rishi Sunak has completed his very mini reshuffle with the appointment of Claire Coutinho as Energy Secretary, the role left vacant by Grant Shapps’s move to the Ministry of Defence. Coutinho leaves her role as a minister in the Department for Education and becomes the first of the 2019 intake to make it to the
Energy prices are coming down, but they should be cheaper
It is hard to remember that this time last year soon-to-be prime minister Liz Truss was on the verge of compromising her free market principles by dreaming up a scheme for the state to make an open-ended commitment to subsidise the energy bills of every household in Britain. At the time, there were dire predictions that
The case for energy nationalisation
We are living through an energy crisis unlike anything since the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. The average household energy bill is set to reach over £3,500 a year. Businesses are already going bankrupt as they face ruinous costs. And inflation, driven in part by high energy prices, is expected to hit 10 per
Martin Lewis is wrong about the ‘energy poll tax’
Given that a fair proportion of the UK public seem to want Martin Lewis to be prime minister, the government might well hesitate to dismiss the Money Saving Expert’s latest grumble: that Ofgem’s cap on standing charges is to be jacked up from today – from 53 pence to 60 pence per day in the
The energy of the world is shifting south
Kenya Greetings from Africa, my beleaguered cousins. I’ve written before about how in 1973, Uganda’s Idi Amin telegrammed Queen Elizabeth, promising to send shiploads of bananas to feed her subjects after ‘following with sorrow the alarming economic crisis befalling on Britain’. Now that you rival Burkina Faso in the number of times you’ve changed your
The true cost of renewable energy
Having delivered his platitudes on climate change at Cop27, Rishi Sunak returns to a more pressing problem: how to keep Britain’s lights on this winter. Last week it was revealed that the government has been wargaming a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ in which blackouts last up to a week. Whether those fears prove unfounded or not,
Keir Starmer is clueless about energy security
It will create lots of well-paid jobs, especially in Scotland. It will reduce our electricity bills. And it will make sure the lights can still be switched on regardless of what is happening in the rest of the world. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has made a big pitch today for ‘energy security’, promising to
Stockpiling energy
‘I’m stockpiling energy.’
Electricity is to blame for stubbornly high energy prices
So much for price-fixing. The energy price cap is finally set to fall, with the result that the average household should have to pay no more than £2,074 a year for its energy from 1 July. The price cap itself has fallen from £3,280, but bills were in practice limited by the government’s other great
The West is on the road to energy ruin
Since the beginning of the Ukraine war and the sanctions it triggered, energy prices have skyrocketed. Liz Truss has warned that soaring energy bills are a ‘price worth paying’ in order to stand up against Vladimir Putin. President Joe Biden has called this year’s rocketing bills ‘Putin’s price hike.’ Margrethe Vestager, vice president of the European Commission,
Net Zero is condemning more Brits to energy poverty
Here’s another great idea from the net zero establishment: only heat your home when it is warm and sunny outdoors. In its Sixth Carbon Budget paper, the government’s Climate Change Committee advises homeowners to turn their heating on in the afternoon, so that they can turn it off again during the evening when demand for
Fusion energy and the coming fight for the Moon
It’s been hard to miss the excitement since the US Energy Department announced that its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had produced a fusion reaction, which, for the first time, unleashed more power than it took to create. Using an array of 192 lasers to superheat and compress hydrogen atoms to more than 100,000,000°C, scientists managed