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New British plan will pay people to be “ready to do nothing” to help with energy crisis

The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution has a new bright idea. Big-Government is going to take £1 each from people using electricity and instead of giving it to people who make electricity, they’re going to give it to people who don’t absolutely have to have electricity. Those people might be paid for doing no useful work, or indeed, in a fabulous twist, they might be paid not to do no work, but just to be prepared to do nothing. It’s a brilliant left-of-center economic move, guaranteed to help the non-essential part of the economy at the expense of the part that does things that matter.

Expect to see the UK doing more non-essential things in future.

Businesses could be paid to shut down from 4pm and 8pm on winter weekdays, under plans approved by regulator Ofgem

by Emily Gosden

Hundreds of businesses could be paid to switch off their power between 4pm and 8pm on winter weekdays as soon as next winter to prevent blackouts, under plans approved by regulator Ofgem.

Mothballed old gas-fired power stations will also be paid to come back to stand-by so they can be fired up to prevent the lights going out when demand is high.

The plans – which together could cost household energy bill-payers about £1 each – were drawn up in the summer after warnings that the risk of blackouts had dramatically increased because old power plants are being shut down and replacements not built.

The United Kingdom leads the way in equalizing national wealth of the first world with the third. Rarely has one modern country done so much to reduce its living standards to create a level playing field. The answer to keeping Britain’s lights on is to turn some of them off.

It used to be there was another option, where the energy crisis would be solved by swapping one type of light globe for another. But this is “beyond electrical efficiency”. Nobody is really kidding anyone anymore that switching off the DVD at the wall will keep the heater running. We’ve moved to deep layer efficiency — the hunt for more efficient blackouts.

Where, once, people thought that insurance against power black-outs meant building bigger generators, now the insurance comes from crafting a team in readiness to take the day off.

Is this deindustrialization or postmodern arts graduates taking over?*

Ofgem said at the time that the spare margin – the buffer between peak demand and available supply – could fall as low as 2pc by winter 2015-16 if demand is high.

Under the plans, a large commercial site such as a supermarket complex using two megawatts of power could receive an up-front payment of £20,000 just to guarantee it could switch off if needed – even if it was never actually asked to do so.

But it’s a Free-Market SolutionTM which means it must be good, right. They’re going to find the cheapest going rate to be prepared to be non-productive.

National Grid would hold a reverse auction next spring where companies will offer the lowest price at which they will agree to switch off when needed.

Read the whole story in The Telegraph (may be paywalled in the UK).

It’s not communism, but it’s not capitalism either. Is it a new kind of thing, a sort of capiommunism? The “other, other plan” perhaps? Where capitalists compete to produce nothing, Greens say “omm”, and nobody builds a better power plant?

h/t GWPF

* This is a trick question. Obviously. 😉

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 fjb1957 writes in a telegraph comment:

 “Ofgem said at the time that the spare margin-the buffer between peak demand and available supply-could fall as low as 2% by winter 2015-16 if demand is high.”

I watched our local news last night and Eggborough power station,coal powered, is due to close at the end of 2015.

Eggborough produces 4% (you do the maths) of the UK`s total electricity supply but must close to meet our EU green targets.

Morons in Wasteminster, following morons in Brussels, this green scam will be the ruination of Britain and its people, one more reason to vote UKIP …

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