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Comment by mattcoles

3 years ago

I understand that curtailment is needed to incentivise private businesses to invest in wind when the output and demand can’t be correlated, but if the government owned the wind farms then it wouldn’t matter if we wasted right? We could just always be overproducing and wouldn’t have to pay for it.

19 comments

mattcoles

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morepork  3 years ago

Assuming a competitive market, the outcome is essentially the same right? If the government builds more than would be economic for a private company they're paying the extra through construction costs/maintenance/financing that they would have been paying to incentivise the extra turbines.

  • nicoburns  3 years ago

    > the outcome is essentially the same right?

    Nope, the difference can be found in the profits made by the company that does in fact own and run the wind farms. The government could capture that should it wish to build them itself. This has been a hot topic recently with regard to fossil fuel energy generators who have been making large profits (in the billions) at the expense of people's energy bills.

  • rtpg  3 years ago

    Except if the government owned it then there is no profit motive to begin with. At one point the number of intermediaries does start mattering (though I imagine that power suppliers are lower margin than other businesses)

    There are a lot of details about... I suppose organizational theory? Which makes the decentralization nicer. But profits come from somewhere

jthirkle  3 years ago

The UK government? Owning things? Surely you can't be serious...

  • alkjsdlkjasd  3 years ago

    They seem to be re-nationalising the railways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_British_Railways

    Maybe not: "The Transport Secretary announced on 19 October 2022 that the Transport Bill which would have set up GBR would not go ahead in the current parliamentary session."

    • HPsquared  3 years ago

      The actual railways (that is, the tracks and the stations) are already government owned anyway (Network Rail).

      Network Rail sells access to the network to train operating companies, which are private (though often state-owned by other countries).

      The network was originally built by private companies until nationalisation in 1947 (railway companies were bankrupt after WW2). It was private for a while in the 90s, then went bankrupt and renationalised in 2002. Seems to be quite the money pit!

    • Jochim  3 years ago

      Why build and maintain the entirety of the infrastructure for a national transport system: payment, timetables, rails, signalling etc. and then hand the very last bit - the only bit that actually generates revenue - to a private company?

      It's just another example of the hubris of the Conservative party. We've seen it play out repeatedly over the last decade and even earlier in Thatcher's neoliberalism. Labour's lurch to the right resulted in displays of similar small minded arrogance. Their undermining of the NHS through piecemeal privatisation is nothing short of a crime.