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So Everywhere else in Britain it is 'too expensive' to put cables underground. Just goes to show how London centric this country is.
by jimnotgym 10mo ago
So Everywhere else in Britain it is 'too expensive' to put cables underground. Just goes to show how London centric this country is.
- jasoncartwright 10mo agoSounds like you are trying to compare the many hundreds of miles (thousands?) of transmission cables needed to cope with the massive geographic change of generation sources to this ~20mi cable system. There are many examples of how the UK is London-centric. This isn't one of them.
- VBprogrammer 10mo agoIt sounds like sour grapes. London contributes nearly a third of the UKs tax income. It has a higher population than the whole of Scotland. Not to mention that over ground wires are manifestly better in every dimension except for aesthetics. This is a great example: https://youtu.be/z-wQnWUhX5Y?si=qdqrpJ-zS7lh2J8Z https://youtu.be/z-wQnWUhX5Y?si=qdqrpJ-zS7lh2J8Z
- jimnotgym 10mo ago>contributes nearly a third of the UKs tax income. Because it contains all of the financial services business that screw money out of all of the real businesses in the rest of the UK.
- ra 10mo agoI know what you're saying, but maybe there is a tipping point when the economics is worth it. Cool to see cycling down there - much safer than on the roads above.
- nkmnz 10mo agoWhat are the costs of an underground cable in the cities you’re considering, expressed as: 1. Cost per kWh transmitted? 2. Cost per person served? 3. Cost per pound of GDP generated? Please provide this for London and the other locations you have in mind.
- docflabby 10mo agoLondon and the south east is the UK in economic terms. Its the only those 2 regions which are net contributor to taxes https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/articles/countryandregionalpublicsectorfinances/financialyearending2023#net-fiscal-balance-for-the-countries-and-regions-of-the-uk https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...
- nephihaha 10mo agoThis region is by far the most heavily subsidised in the UK in reality, which is confirmed by the number of expensive infrastructure projects there such as this one. London is effectively kept going by these infrastructure projects and so many UK government agencies and businesses being headquartered there. Even the monarchy plays a role, as a massive gravy train mostly based there. All that money keeps other businesses in London going. Every time someone pays UK taxes in any form they are supporting jobs and physical facilities based there. The BBC is another one. People throughout the UK are forced to pay a licence fee that is mostly used to produce content in and about London. This is part of a repeating pattern. London took massive amounts of resources such as coal, metals and manufactured goods from other parts of the UK which are now in poverty. The North Sea Oil boom of the 1980s, was used to prop up the London stock market, and only a fraction of that money stayed within Scotland which was suffering industrial decline at the time. (Aberdeen has surprisingly little to show for the oil boom and is now a city in heavy decline.)
- matt-p 10mo agoVast majority of the civil service is outside of London these days, I suspect disproportionally so. BBC similarly, spends the vast majority of it's money outside London. If you were from anywhere near Manchester, Glasgow or Liverpool you'd know that perfectly well. I'm afraid governments have actually done genuine work to try and reduce dependence on London to not very much avail. Network effects rule again, why is twitter (X) bigger and more popular than blusky or whatever?
- jimnotgym 10mo agoIt would be nice to have a similar study that corrected for 1) the amount of wealth claimed to be generated in London, that was actually just financial services sucking in money from the rest of the UK 2) The cost of all the pensioners that left London when they retired, claiming their pension and health care in a different part of the country
- zeristor 10mo agoManchester is burgeoning, still someways behind London. It’d be super, smashing, great! for the cities to be far better connected together across the Pennines.
- walthamstow 10mo agoYou're lucky to have us mate. London is the only thing going for this country. We should be betting /more/ on London.
- immibis 10mo agoOn the flip side, that's mostly because London takes all their wealth and crowds out wealth generation
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- walthamstow 10mo agoPeople move to where the jobs are. That's how most English towns came to exist in the first place in the industrial revolution. We're ~30 years into a new information/digital revolution and London is a world centre of it. There's plenty of wealth generation happening. People are welcome to sit and wait for it to come to them if they want.
- jimnotgym 10mo agoCan you give me some examples of wealth generation from London?. You can exclude the massive amount of Financial Services that they shout about so much, that is just a way of skimming wealth of real businesses.
- walthamstow 10mo agoSeeing as you're already here, why don't you go to the last HN hiring page and search for London, then you can apply your special criteria about what's a real business and what isn't.
- nephihaha 10mo ago
- KaiserPro 10mo agoYes. And I wish people would understand how costs work. Pylons need space right, they also need maintenance corridors and access. Every ~360m you need a space to put a pylon[1]. Can you imagine the cost of buying 400m2 every 360 in zone 1? what about the scaffolding when you need to re-string the cables? can you imagine how expensive that would be? what about if a lorry smacks into it? Its just not practical. I grew up in norfolk, next to a bunch of HV pylons. No-one commented on them, because they were always there. THey are going to put some more in, and suddenly "its a blot on the land scape" and its "ecological damaging" Then its proposed that the cables are buried. apparently a 200 meter clearing 30km long is more ecologically friendly than pylons ever n hundred meters. but thats an aside. [1]https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-distance-between-electricity-pylons#:~:text=The%20standard%20optimal%20HV%20pylon%20separation%20is,Airships%20*%20Ski%20lifts%20*%20Cable%20cars https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-distance-between-electrici...
- jimnotgym 10mo agoI wish that people understood how costs work? Does that count as polite conversation in London? It is about typical of how Londoners sneer at the rest of the UK. London is the place that costs don't work. It is full of things that don't need to be there, driving up the real estate prices. The port closed decades ago, so let's move the insurance and FX markets somewhere cheaper? Let's move out the government departments too. Modern London is all about MPs who are physically tethered to Westminster by in person voting, being surrounded by the kind of people who want direct access to MPs... All of the companies who specialise in creaming money off real companies gravitate towards that pig trough. Today they need data centres as close as possible, so they can cream money off faster. And we now have to feed those parasites with extra power lines. Don't lecture me on costs, while London continues to try so hard to inflate the price of the tidal mud it resides on, by sucking in the rest of the UKs wealth.
- bboreham 10mo agoFX trading has been completely online for about 20 years.
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- 7952 10mo agoWell they are put underground sometimes when there is a sound reason to do so. But mostly there is not a good reason to do so across hundreds of miles of agricultural land.