Comments on: It’s time to own the National Grid https://neweconomics.opendemocracy.net/time-national-grid/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=time-national-grid Tue, 11 Sep 2018 13:05:50 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.3.4 By: Hobbit_CZ https://neweconomics.opendemocracy.net/time-national-grid/#comment-1102 Wed, 28 Mar 2018 16:12:00 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/?p=2663#comment-1102 I am just not sure if this is naivety or stupidity. Your idea that public (understand government’s) ownership will be better than private hands is just totally off. What will happen is, that it will became just another way of taxation. Government will reap the profits and this would be a welcome source of what is essentially the tax money, but nicely covered so it does not look like a tax. Also government will put in a leadership of those companies people who helped their political objectives rather than true specialists. NO NO and NO. This is insanely stupid and just populist idea which sounds so good on the paper but is disastrous in reality. Much MUCH better is private ownership with tough regulation. Then you combine the public interest (which you say you have in your mind) with efficiency and professionalism, because it is at utmost interest of such company to be run as efficient as possible and have real professionals doing their jobs. While for government owned companies you don’t care about efficiencies, you probably care much more to give jobs to all your friends or not to fire many terribly underperforming people who than can vote against you. Yes, we should not let natural monopolies to freely exploit the public, that’s why we need high quality regulation, we should also make sure that they invest enough in the future. Btw you picked really bad example. National Grid is way more efficient in every metric than it was during government ownership and also compared to many government owned utility companies and they also keep very high level of investments to keep the grid running and up to par with future demands (great example is just recent announcement of the investment in charging points or battery storage).
Don’t break something what is actually working well! Your ideas are as naive as dangerous.

]]> By: Robert Loveday https://neweconomics.opendemocracy.net/time-national-grid/#comment-1077 Wed, 14 Mar 2018 14:16:00 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/?p=2663#comment-1077 Yet more lunacy about ‘decentralised’ generation. What is the National Grid if NOT a decentralised system of generation?

Besides which, localised energy using renewables ISN’T green. It would entail building masses more storage facilities, interconnectors, etc, etc. to make it work.

A far better option is to use ‘monolithic’ nuclear, with which France decarbonised its grid more than a quarter of a century ago in a little over a decade and a half.

But don’t let considerations such as the actual facts of physics and engineering get in the way of this happy-clappy nonsense.

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