UKH

Earlier this morning I got “told off “ for measuring out three mugs of water ( plus a splash ) into the kettle Rather than just filling it up got later . Many years ago my brother told me off for over filling the kettle and ever since I have measure out . My retort this morning - “ if everybody in Britain did this we could turn off a power station “ . Of course . I’ve no idea whatsoever if this is true but without the back of an envelope to hand I put it you ? My gut feeling is , with not overly wild assumptions , I m correct ?

In reply to mike123:

I’m interested in this.  MrS and I occasionally embark on kettle wars.  He’s a bare minimum guy whilst I go for a bit more generosity (not overfilling though).

Not convinced it makes a massive difference, especially as it’s not unknown to have to refill and boil again using his method because there’s not quite enough in there or someone hears the kettle and appears looking for a brew.

I’d imagine to do a proper study we would need to go into water temperature, kettle energy ratings, size of mug, accuracy of measuring, probability of extra brew being required.

In reply to mike123:

Without doing any googling, a kettle is typically 3kW, and boils in ~1 minute with three cups of tea. Lets say 1 minute saved compared to boiling a full kettle. If I boil a kettle 4 times a day, that's 4 minutes out of 24 hours that the kettle would otherwise be on but isn't.

3kW * 4 minutes / 24 hours = 8.333 W per household

How many households in the country? 67 million people, so lets say 20 million households.

8.333 W * 20 million = 166.7 MW, which must be pushing towards power station numbers, I think they generally talk in MW not GW.

I read yesterday that a single rotation of the largest wind turbine could power a UK household for 2 days, but that's a separate calculation.

So where did I go wrong? Perhaps I should have calculated per person rather than per household.

In reply to tlouth7:

I think it has more to do the with the peak power required - that determines how many power stations you actually need.

So lets say overfilling the kettle means it takes 2 minutes to boil rather than 1 minute, at 3 kW.
Let's also say that 15 million (ie most) households use the kettle once at a random time during the peak period 6-9 pm, a 3 hour period. More kettles will be on at once if they are overfilled, and I find that the difference in total power required is

15e6*3e3/(180/2)-15e6*3e3/(180/1) = about 250 MW, or one smallish power station.

Or thereabouts.

In reply to mike123:

If this does 'turn off a power station' what happens to the workers there? You've given no thought to their plight nor indeed the families thrown into poverty by your callous indifference. People like you should be ashamed!

In reply to mike123:

Almost certainly given the wide range in power outputs of power stations, from tiny run of  river hydro to offshore megastructures or Drax.  You will find one that matches the savings.

Given the energy required to heat water, as well as boiling it, this has to be a major source of wastage.  Can you get away with making hot drinks without the boiling penalty?

In reply to Fat Bumbly2:

[...]

I have had "tea" in places where this is tried. A dry teabag next to a cup of water, at a temperature probably too hot to wash in. It was vile. If you're talking about hot ribena or herbal infusions or coffee you can get away with hot water, but tea requires boiling water, no ifs buts or maybes.

In reply to mike123:

Let's say you put an extra 2 cups in, which is ~500ml or 0.5kg, and it is then allowed to cool all the way down (so we're not considering any benefit of a prewarmed kettle for the next cup).

Wasted energy is m x c x delta T = 0.5 x 4200 x (100-15) = 179kJ 

If one in 100 people in the UK did this, total wasted energy is 125GJ

If they all did that over the course of an hour in the morning, you'd need a power of around 35MW to drive it. 'Power stations' can be a few MW to a few GW, so yes, it's in the order of closing a power station.

In reply to mike123:

You need to work on your 'free pour' technique. Good bar staff can so this fairly accurately for measures of 25/30 ml so you should be able to manage for a few mug's worth with practice.

I would find someone measuring mugs of water to boil in a kettle absolutely infuriating but then again I am a steadfast kitchen Nazi. Think Gordon Ramsay but without the tolerance (or the cooking skills).

In reply to Andy Hardy:

Am trying to remember what tea at altitude was like - to be fair I was usually too thirsty or knackered to care, even on a beach (Titicaca).

Was served a reasonable cup once in Vancouver at a shop that insisted on 97 deg, but I too am a  must be freshly boiled person too.

In reply to mike123:

 As usual a typical ukc bunfight , disregarding burning out the kettle element and it's general lifespan. Far more costly than a few watthours .  Boiling for  a single cup just fill to minimum level on kettle. Recover the element immediately with cold water after use . Kettle then lasts for years.

In reply to mike123:

We make a pot and a flask of black tea in the morning for all day tea enjoyment. 

The tea cosy keeps the tea warm for about 2 hours. 

Flask for about 8-10 hours

Takes 2 kettle worth 

In reply to mike123:

But the unused hot water is still sitting in the kettle. In winter this must mean that the kitchen is marginally warmer and so the heating does not have to work quite as hard in that room as it otherwise would.

Vary marginal but that might limit any energy savings to the difference in efficiency between the kettle and the central heating.

In reply to PaulW:

Yes, in months when you're heating the room, you can consider the energy not to be wasted as such.

Mind you, using an electric element to heat a room is the most expensive way possible to do it - electricity is much more expensive per unit than gas and you don't get the CoP gains of a heat pump. It's the same argument as made for using 100w incandescent bulbs in winter... yes the heat is not 'wasted', but there are much better ways to heat a room.

In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

And wet air is absolutely useless in a house. It's dry air that is produced for space heating. Wet air is extracted or else fungus  grows all over the walls.

Frankly anyone who thinks that boiling Spare Water is a good idea should be obliged to go back to school for some maths and physics lessons. That should put a stop to such silliness.

In reply to mike123:

The power output from a treadmill is estimated to be between 100 and 400 W (although the top end sounds rather a lot for your average punter wanting a morning cuppa). Assuming 200W then 15 min on a treadmill would boil the kettle. Across the country that should save a powerstation. Discuss.....

In reply to Andy Hardy:

A more subtle method is to make tea with boiling water but in reduced quantity - just enough to brew the bag.  Top up with water that did not boil and you have reduced the energy required without producing tepid tea.

In reply to mike123:

Since I don't drink hot drinks, your "teller offer" can have my quota of kettle boiling and not need to worry themselves about it! 😀

In reply to mike123:

Assume 2/3rd boiled unnecessarily, 8% transmission losses (the factor 0.92) and 85% kettle efficiency (the factor 0.85) :

Power ≈ (28 million households in the UK) * (1 kettle/household) * (1 litre kettle / boil even) *(3 boil events / day) * (2/3) * (1000g / L) * (80C * 4.2 J/C/g) / (24 hours / day) / ( 3600 s / hour)  / (0.92 * 0.85) 

Power ≈ 280 MW (rounded to the same number of significant figures as the population estimate and efficiency estimates).

That's about one small UK thermal (gas or coal) power plant.

In reply to hang_about:

With or without a plane on it?

In reply to mike123:

Our kettle has a remarkably useful gauge on the side so we know how much to fill it without decanting mugs into it. Doesn't everyone do it that way?

In reply to Andy Hardy:

Yes, this is why we built the power stations in the first place - to facilitate living our lives in the way we want. Since most people don’t accurately fill their kettle (at best using the markers on the side), and since electricity is relatively cheap today, we need enough power to cope with this demand for boiling water in a straightforward way. 

If you want to live your life with the parsimony of a shepherd in a developing country making tea over a fire of twigs which he himself has colllected, well, you only get one life and it’s yours to waste. The advantage of living in a rich country is we don’t need to be so hemmed in. 

In reply to Dave B:

Amateurs...  That'd all be gone in a morning when I WFH.

In reply to Lankyman:

Perhaps their next job could be in Cyber?

In reply to seankenny:

Is it? Mine seems pretty expensive these days

In reply to owlart:

In the long run, yes. The point is more that the modern world exists in part to give us freedom from want, and being over-parsimonious is the opposite of that. 
 

Amyhow, fun to watch British people become accepting of their lower standard of living in real time.  

In reply to seankenny:

I suspect there are many such shepherds who have a far more fulfilling life than millions doomscrolling through Twitter on their £1000 smartphone every spare minute of the day. If we didn’t default to measuring the value of a life by wealth and consumption then the world might be in a better state. 

In reply to mike123:

My first question is why doesn't your kettle have a clear window on the side, with a floaty ball telling you how many cups it has in it. A number you naturally have to half, since they assume you use a thimble as a cup. 

My next question is actually a tip, and that's to manually stop the kettle as soon as it starts to boil. Or before. Most kettles I've met boil forever before knocking off, and if you're a coffee drinker, you don't need to boil the water anyway. Tea drinkers, I'm just disappointed with you for wasting energy.

My final question is forbidden to be checked by google, but how does a kettle know it's boiling and when to switch off when the boiling point of water varies and therefore cant be checked with a water temp sensor?

In reply to montyjohn:

Does it know it's boiling when the water temperature stops rising?

In reply to Luke90:

It's Yehudi, moonlighting from the fridge

In reply to john arran:

Every electric kettle I have had, for yonks, has had a window on the side so you can see the water level, with graduated marks for minimum, 2 cups, 4 cups etc. Also, they all switch off promptly once the water starts boiling. There is a tube in the inside of the kettle that feeds steam down to a thermostat at the base, which shuts off when the temperature reaches the boiling point. (The thermostat doesn't have to be very accurate, because it senses a way lower temperature before the steam comes down the pipe.) I suspect this would work at higher altitudes where the boiling point is less.

In reply to John Stainforth:

Not sure about the thermostat at the base. I presumed most kettles switched off when the steam created a higher pressure in the space above, which is why they usually won't switch off when the lid is open, even when boiling rapidly.

In reply to john arran:

Nothing to do with pressure, except that the steam expands out of a small hole taking the temperature sensor from ambient to 100C at the moment of boiling.  Unfortunately the sensor is usually a bimetal strip which physically has to bend and is quite slow.

In reply to mike123:

More importantly what's your favourite biscuit to go with the tea once made? And how much difference would it make if the kettle was powered by a treadmill?

In reply to Stuart Williams:

I spent over a decade working in international development and as a result have met a fair few such shepherds. You only have to hear one description of giving birth in rural Afghanistan to realise that you’re talking a lot of nonsense and romanticising a very harsh and unpleasant way of life. Most people move to urban areas to consume more as soon as they can. But perhaps you know something about being a poor farmer that actual poor farmers don’t?

In reply to john arran:

No, they have a simple thermostat that is triggered by the temperature of steam coming down a pipe from the top of the kettle. This doesn't work when the lid is open, because the hot steam goes up into the outside air, rather than down the pipe.

In reply to john arran:

It's a bit awkwardly placed on my kettle, which irritatingly makes it difficult to see when filling from a tap. More pertinently, my kettle's quite heavy, and the path of least resistance of a bleary morning is just to fill a mug and tip it in

In reply to seankenny:

I’m not idealising that way of life or saying it is easy. I just don’t think living in harsh circumstances or living a simple life equates to someone’s life being wasted. 

I think you are making a mistake in conflating someone’s wealth and consumption with whether their life is wasted or has value.

In reply to seankenny:

Given that around 50% of our power capacity still comes from setting fire to stuff and spaffing the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, don't you think we might put a little effort into not doing it unnecessarily?

In reply to Stuart Williams:

No, I’m saying that cosplaying being poorer than you really are is of dubious worth. 

If you read the post a little carefully, you’ll see it says that for many years I worked for organisations trying to help many of the poorest people on Earth. Clearly I took a considerable financial hit to do so. Is that really consistent with claiming that I think the lives of very poor people have little value, or less than our own? 

In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

Yes, through systematic change in the way we produce power. Asking people to make tiny changes of limited worth can - in my view - be counterproductive. Either they overestimate the value of a small action and ignore the bigger actions (carefully measuring out cups of water into the kettle then flying to Spain on holiday), or they react against what they see as an unreasonable imposition and become receptive to anti-environmental policies which have a far bigger negative impact than simply boiling an extra cup of water. 

In reply to seankenny:

A pretty cynical and unpleasant characterisation of efforts to consume less resources. I think I’m on pretty safe ground in saying that isn’t the motivation behind this thread.

I don’t know anything about your financial circumstances or past earning potential. Why would I? Ditto your motivations for, and the specifics of, any career choices. 

In reply to Stuart Williams:

Really? There’s a strong puritanical streak in the English middle classes that dresses up being tight as something virtuous. In my view it’s very similar to the attitude of buying a £25k van, “dossing” in a lay-by and then causing all sorts of problems in national parks. 

Isn’t it obvious that charities pay less for someone with a particular set of skills than the private sector would? Isn’t it also obvious that someone who has worked in international development actually does think the lives of the very poorest are of equal worth to ours? And isn’t it actually kind of insulting to suggest otherwise? 

In reply to mike123:

How much energy does a popcorn maker use? 

(Asking for a friend 😂)

In reply to seankenny:

I’m sure all that is obvious to a certain extent to someone who has worked in international development. Having not worked in international development I’ve no idea what it pays or involves, or what the term encompasses.

Probably, but then I thought the “it’s your life to waste” comparison with the shepherd was pretty insulting. Glad to hear I misunderstood what you meant by it. 

In reply to Stuart Williams:

Hey, Google is a thing! If you didn’t know that international development means trying to help really poor people, you can find it out! In about three minutes! You can learn stuff! It’s amazing!

I literally said I was talking about rich people playing at being poorer than they were. Still, the poor of the world can sleep a little more easily on their stony beds tonight knowing that you’ve got their back. 
 

In reply to seankenny:

Fortunately those who are aware of the impact of their spare water boiling are also well aware of the dangers of flying and consequently minimize their use of that transport medium just as they minimize their energy consumption in preparing a cup of tea. And anyway it's not a tiny change. Heating water is the second biggest consumer of power in your home after space heating 

In reply to seankenny:

I was working in international development on short term contracts for about 20 years. While it isn't just about the money, I have to admit that the pay was usually considerably better than I could have made doing similar roles at home. It's far from being a black and white, purely altruistic endeavour.

In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

In such months, the heat consumed by a person ends up back in the environment too, although it might suppress a bit of metabolic heat generation I suppose.

So, why not use a heat-pump kettle?  Then it's just temporarily borrowing a bit of heat from the environment, to which it will return.  Concentrating that heat in a fluid then in a person will also reduce thermal losses from the house.  Win/win.  

Just have to deal with collecting the condensation on the cold side for disposal - but recovering the heat from the pesky boil off from the kettle is a clear win for the COP and good for the house.

(Scuttles off to find the collection of TEC elements and sketch a design for a TEC kettle...  It's probably going to need a stacked approach...)

In reply to john arran:

Oh absolutely, it’s certainly not full of angels. And it can be intellectually interesting, you get to see the world, etc. Contracting is usually more lucrative, but I could have earned more elsewhere for sure. However the idea that doing that kind of work means you’re dismissive of the worth of poor people is pretty dumb. 

In reply to mutt:

I reject this suggestion outright. We live in a world in which environmentalists have made policy choices which exacerbate climate change, from campaigning against new infrastructure to shutting down Germany’s nuclear power stations. This happens everywhere, so the idea that environmental concerns will lead to good environmental choices flies in the face of evidence. 

Ahhh, the difference between total use and marginal use. We’re talking about an extra cup of water being heated as compared to baths, showers, washing machines. 

In reply to seankenny:

The four estimates I've seen on this thread, in order of posting:

• tlouth7 - 166.7 MW,
• Jamie Wakenham - 35 MW
• Wintertree - 280 MW
• mbh - 250 MW

Taking the arithmetic mean and rounding to the nearest MW, that's 183 MW .   A bath is around 5 kWH.  Whack the maths together and that's around 880,000 baths a day, ignoring the heinous inefficiency of burning fossil fuels to make electricity to boil a distant electric kettle.

Not to be sniffed at.

Edit: Some of the estimates (mine included) are ignoring the latent heat of evaporation of water, which is a much more egregious waste of energy at the higher temperatures reached in boiling a kettle than in running a bath.

In reply to mbh:

It's statistical, isn''t it?  Post broadcast TV, kettle boiling is pretty de-correlated.  Which is why, as per a prior UKC "wintertime vs the word on Kettles" thread, I argued that simply lowering the element power on all kettles would increase the instantaneous power draw on the grid, because kettles would take longer to boil, worsening their efficiency due to having longer to loose energy, thus raising the number of kettles boiling at any one point more than e.g. doubling the boiling time for a halving of element power.

To actually convert it to a power station I'd probably take estimates like yours and mine and double them, on account of way more kettles being boiled by day than by night.  

It's pretty amazing to think of a small coal power plant existing purely to allow kettles to be overfilled.  Look after the kW and the GW look after themselves.

In reply to Lankyman:

They can go and have a cup of tea.

In reply to wintertree:

I get your point, but there is an element here of “if we did a thing we don’t do, it would be bad”.

Not really, because we built the power stations to facilitate our lifestyles, and part of that is making electricity cheap enough that we can put our limited attention and effort into other things. (And part is tea, obviously!) Or at least, we have the option to do this. Many people who do live in poor countries with much more limited energy supply try very hard to move to more energy abundant countries, which suggests that for many people being very alert to the minutiae of energy use is tedious. Anyone serious about behaviour change needs to take this sort of thing into consideration…

In reply to wintertree:

I hate it when I’m asked to compare numbers given to different levels of precision (inferred by the number of decimal places). 😀

In reply to Thugitty Jugitty:

What you should do is start a thread on UKC to ask for advice about it!  Just maybe wait till the grumpy ass trying to die on a hill on the point has given up...

Meantime, you'll have to get up earlier in the morning to catch me out - in my post I stated "Power ≈ 280 MW (rounded to the same number of significant figures as the population estimate and efficiency estimates)." so it's not inferred, it's given in that case - I rounded it to the level of precision in the inputs.

Given that they're Fermi estimates we shouldn't really look beyond the magnitude of the numbers - and I thought it was interesting how close 3 of them came in that sense.

In reply to seankenny:

I was responding to your specific comment about the shepherd, not trying to work out how much you might have been paid to meet said shepherd.

Besides, I’m not naive enough to think that no one working to help people poorer than themselves could ever make a less than favourable judgement about those people.

Yes, but that was several posts later and I’m afraid I experience time as linear.

As entertaining as this “don’t you know who I am?” routine has been, I’m going to leave you to it. 

In reply to seankenny:

Good job no one has made that claim then, isn’t it?

In reply to wintertree:

Mine is only lower because I introduced a 1 in 100 people factor. If I'd arbitrarily said 1 in 10 we'd have been in much closer agreement!

In reply to Stuart Williams:
 

One minute you don’t know what the job involves, the next minute you know all about the motivations of people doing the job. It’s awesome to see someone move from ignorance to experience so quickly. 

More seriously, instead of going online to accuse a stranger of finding a whole group of humans worthless, how about taking a moment to ask yourself: “Is this person a horror or is there something about their point that I might have misunderstood?” 
 

I suspect the problem here is that you see our poverty stricken shepherd boiling his water on his little fire and see it as more wholesome than more developed lifestyles. This is pure Noble Savage stuff that’s been around as long as industrial society has. I find it reactionary and unpleasant. 

In reply to mike123:

Don't drink tea or coffee. 

It's like the liquid version of vegetarianism. 

The vegan version would include any drink that has been heated during production. That'll be no beer either then. 

Saving the planet little by little. 

In reply to Andy Hardy:

That depends very much on the tea. If you're drinking breakfast tea from a tea bag, I agree that boiling water is pretty much essential.

If you're drinking good quality whole leaf teas, they usually taste better when brewed with cooler water. Brew them too hot, and the subtle flavours get overpowered by bitterness. A good quality black tea will often taste best brewed around 90°, while top quality first flush black teas are often best brewed at 80° or even cooler.

White teas and green teas are usually brewed even cooler. A lot of the highest quality white or green teas are best brewed at 60° or below.

Edit: The ideal coffee brewing temperature can be very varied too:

Instant coffee: there is no brewing involved when making instant coffee, just rehydration. If you make it with 60° water and drink it immediately, it will taste identical to if you make it with boiling water, and then let it cool to 60°. So if you're only boiling the kettle for instant coffee, you might as well turn it off long before boiling.

Espresso: hugely variable. Somewhere around 93° is often a good starting point but it depends on the beans, roast level, grind size, brew ratio, dose, pressure, machine etc. A change of 2 or 3° in either direction can change a shot from delicious to undrinkable

Filter: For light roasts, you usually need boiling water for the best results. For darker roasts, 85-95°. Full immersion methods like a cafetiere need slightly cooler water than percolation methods.

Mokka pot: it's complicated. To simplify it: dark roasts taste best with the brew temperature minimised, while light roasts taste best with brew temperature maximised but brewing cut off prior to sputtering.

Sometimes, I think I might have gone a bit too far down the tea/coffee rabbit holes!

In reply to Andy Hardy:

Try building a tea bag - or boiling potatoes - at a mountain top 2,400 m above sea level and you'll soon realise it's not boiling water that matters, but very hot water - unobtainable at said altitude.  At the observatory in La Palma they boil small potatoes in highly salted water so they will cook faster, resulting in these salted encrusted things that probably took 4 years off my life.

Which is why tea should be brewed in pressure vessels, which would also eliminate the boil-off that wastes so much energy from kettles whilst contributing to humidity and mould problems in houses.  

In reply to mike123:

Just picked up this thread but haven’t read through it all. 
Not sure if has been factored into the calculations but the kettle must have a minimum volume of water in it else the element burns out or the kettle won’t work; so this volume needs taking account of as essential water that must be heated.

Also tea made with reheated hot water is horrible as all the dissolved air has been removed ( not so important for coffee). So properly made tea is less environmentally friendly as you’re throwing away that volume of water that must be in the kettle 

In reply to wintertree:

Did they actually add enough salt to have a meaningful impact on the boiling point?

If my back of an envelope sums are correct, it would take 286g to change the boiling point of a litre of water by 5° and it would take 450g to get the boiling point back to 100° (ignoring the fact that you can't dissolve 450g of NaCl in a litre of water).

In reply to thread : thanks all . Since I posed the question I’ve just taken the time to read through the thread . Brilliant . A few comments from me . When I said “ turn off a power station ‘ what I was getting at was that on daily basis as a nation we must be wasting an insane amount of electricity boiling water that is then left to go go cold . The kettle in question is an old so very cheap white plastic one that has no window . That travels from site to site with the loose collective of people i regularly work with . The old stables we are close to finishing restoring has the water turned off a the plumber was wrestling with a ridiculously over engineered shower valve that despite looking very fancy does t seem to work . He’s normally very chilled but on this occasion was not . I wandered across to a neighbouring house and put just enough water in from their outside tap to make a brew for me , him and his apprentice. This led to the question in the OP and my retort . I then asked what the other two normally did at home,   which was to fill the kettle right up however many brews they were making , which then led on to my power station comment . I do understand that we can’t just turn a power station off but imagine if some government quango  managed to get people to stop doing this ? A minor inconvenience for millions of people would make  a massive difference . 

In reply to montyjohn:

I did work experience a lifetime ago with the company that makes most of the world's kettle thermostats.

They use a bimetalic disk formed into a shallow dome so it's bi-stable rather than flexing gradually. Think of a child's jumping rubber popper toy. The disk is trimmed into something like an E shape and clamped at the rim. You now have a middle finger that pops up and down at design temperature. That trips a switch.

One disk is thermally linked to the element for boil dry protection, the other sited so itisexposed to steam, it doesn't get hot until the kettle produces enough hot steam to displace the warm air. It trips below 100deg, it's the production of steam to transfer heat better than air that does it.

Jk

In reply to apache:

That is true, although I suspect that the ~500ml that most jug type kettles insist on is hugely conservative and as long as you have well covered the bottom plate it'll be fine.

If you're frequently boiling only 250ml then either a little travel kettle or a stovetop might be a better call.  I have a stovetop that I frequently use to do about 200ml for the aeropress, and it's been going for 20 years, so obviously not too destructive.

In reply to wintertree:

I tried to build this in a GCSE CDT class about 30 years ago.  Got quite  along way down the line before my teacher realised what I was up to and wouldn't let me finish it.  Spoilsport.

In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

Getting a bit silly, but I wait until the hiss has stopped.  There's an urge to pour proper boiling water onto your tea.  Although I'm fairly sure the water stays just as hot until the element reaches water temperature, and you reduce evaporation, over heating the element, and limescale.

In reply to mike123:

You can, the one I'm working on at this moment, turns on and off twice a day regularly.

In reply to jkarran:

I have about 5000 of these very discs on my workshop floor. A few years back I was commissioned to make a sculpture of an owl incorporating them to hang in the head office of said company.

In reply to seankenny:

Do we suppose Suella would be more or less sympathetic to the huddled masses yearning for whatever if she thought the ease or otherwise of tea-making for them was what was driving them across the Channel?

In reply to jkarran:

Great answer. Awarded extra points for the first hand experience.

In reply to seankenny:

And that is also a false promise. You are stereotyping all environmentalists, a typical approach to Othering so that you can support your position. Environmentalists come in all shapes, sizes, viewpoints, and interests. Individually some might quite legitimately be concerned about radiation leaks but not give one hoot about animal welfare and others might be scientists who just find ignorance irritating. 

In reply to SDM:

I don't know, but it rendered the potatoes in to something quite spectacularly hard to eat.  Perhaps it was just a taste thing now  looking up the numbers as you did.

In reply to Jamie Wakenham:

Looking back on my childhood experiments with a pressure cooker I must have been blessed by luck.

In reply to mike123:

CCGT plants start and stop in response to demand on short timescales, so it can happen.  

The increasingly toxic, libertarian right in the UK would probably weaponise is at their latest source of ire about government control; since Covid they're reduced to grasping at straws over things like traffic calming schemes to find something to tilt at...

In reply to mutt:

The Green Party in the U.K. have campaigned against house building and HS2. In Germany, they have preferred carbon emitting power stations to nuclear ones. In California environmental concerns lay behind many, many attempts to prevent building housing and infrastructure - including high speed inter city rail lines. This is the political wing of environmentalism in several countries. If environmentalists don’t want these charges laid against them, they need to work on better political representation. 

My position is that Green parties are not as serious as their analysis warrants, that they are playing at politics. Instead of using the language of the sociology department as a fancy way of complying that I’m not playing nice, why not direct your ire towards the low quality Green Party politicians? 
 

In reply to seankenny:

I think you might well be holding the green party to a higher standard than us reasonable. Should we condemn the labour party for having fielded corbyn and then just a few months later returning to middle ground politics? Or the conservative party for having the ERG politics  and also soft Brexit pragmatists at the heart of government? I have been to a green party conference and I can tell you that there is a vigorous debate inside the party about what policies should be pursued. There is no one source of truth in any political party. There is however only one set of physical laws those should be sufficient in determining the right course if action when heating water for tea. Boiling extra spare water is always wasteful. You might want to Other me by ascribing to me the views of other people but that does not undermine the correctness of the physics. 

In reply to mutt:

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at the policy positions of lots of Green Parties and thinking that they are deeply counterproductive. Closing down nuclear power stations and continuing to use coal, for example, is stupid. And that’s Europe’s most powerful and mature Green Party in action. 

Yes, it was a stupid and self-indulgent move which directly led to the lowest number of Labour MPs since 1935. Not to mention the anti-Semitism. 

Actually after five years, a lost election and a terrible referendum campaign. You call it middle ground politics, I call it being in with a chance to win an election. 

So? Vigorous debate doesn’t necessarily lead to good outcomes. For example, the Green manifesto says they want to open “new rail connections that remove bottlenecks, increase rail freight capacity, improve journey times and frequencies,” which is what HS2 will do by separating out express and local services, but HS2 is “doomed” and they’d scrap it. After all, Britain doesn’t need high speed rail like other European countries! What it needs is a government that would micromanage bike lanes - “Spending £2.5 billion a year on new cycleways and footpaths, built using sustainable materials., such as woodchips and sawdust.” - that’s literally the first line of their section on transport. The whole manifesto is full of crazy counter productive stuff like this. 

Untwist yer knickers kiddo, let’s save the description of othering for people who demonise others in order to legitimise abuse against them. That’s serious stuff. This is just criticising politicians for being not very good, which is the whole point of living in a democracy.