iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Plus I don’t buy petrol anymore for the (secondhand, very nice) EV. Another £1000. Overall, electrification is a huge route to practical decarbonisation and cost saving.

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Plus the gas standing charge, of course! Another £100.

This was 2025. Because of the battery and PV, my average tariff rate for this was about 12p/kWh, so it cost me about £200 in electricity. The equivalent 7.5MWh of gas would have cost about £550. You’ll notice I get a bit of comfort cooling in summer from the MVHR duct heat exchanger, which is nice.

I’m in a small Enerphit, peak heat demand about 1700W or 16 W/m2, with rads. My 3.5kW Arotherm+ with a 50L volumiser and 120L system volume with emitters for DT=10-15K cycles about 1/h in the worst (mild) conditions, which costs a bit of COP, but I still get a SCOP of about 3.5. It’s fine.

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Shocking! Unexpected that the UK BUS would end up being an exemplar of good policy design driving decarbonisation at low cost!

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In fact, is that it? There’s a lot of accounting theology around CfD, just like there is around lease accounting and currency income/expenditure hedging? Is this the subsidy monitors accounting for CfD in a weird way that makes the numbers silly?

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Short answer: yes. And no, those numbers aren’t real. The current estimated cost of Sizewell C is £38bn, with the taxpayer having 44% of the project. So this is some notional thing assuming cost overruns, interest, inflation and crazy CFD accounting.

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Sizewell C Development Expenditure (Devex) Subsidy Scheme

The current exposure seems to be £5.4bn? www.gov.uk/government/p...

gov.uk

David Dye @davedye.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Bristol Ballon Fiesta photos - vintage lift this evening

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Reposted by David Dye

Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I know I mostly just laugh at adverts but this ad for Le Shuttle is terrific. Perfectly captures how going on it felt as a kid.

youtu.be

LeShuttle. Experience the extraordinary.

YouTube video by LeShuttle

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David Dye @davedye.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

I remember a chart a few months ago showing policy/infra costs and gas starting to come off in about 2030… . Future goodies deferred, jam tomorrow… it would be great to show some jam today…

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David Dye @davedye.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

It will reduce the electricity-gas price differential (‘spark gap’), not by much, but a bit, so it should boost electrification.

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David Dye @davedye.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

The agencies can issue press release after press release saying they’re spending money, but something funny’s going on, because it’s not making it through to researchers…

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David Dye @davedye.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Yeah, but at the sharp end where I am, EPSRC is visibly doing everything it can to avoid admitting that it doesn’t have the budget to fund responsive mode proposals or PhDs. Where there are targeted calls, like in nuclear skills, it’s ok, but more broadly it’s worrying…

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David Dye @davedye.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Problem is, university research funding is down hugely - STEM PhDs down 30%, etc, and most universities are cutting academic staff (incl STEM). So: the research (and skills) base is rapidly downsizing in response to the enormous real terms funding cuts of the last decade. Strategy papers are nice…

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David Dye @davedye.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

The big question of the year is: how do we get the system costs of all these cumulative interventions down? Understanding the graveyard of good intentions is a beginning…? Cumulatively, we’re allowing a bunch of unknown players to make off like bandits with everyone’s money due to bad policy?

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Reposted by David Dye

Jonathan Portes @jdportes.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

I for one am proud that @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social's student body reflects the diversity of our city - something that was not remotely the case when I was an undergraduate.

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David Dye @davedye.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Is the Bridges issue on the Thames correctly understood as a consequence of them being allocated to Boroughs rather than TFL? Regional infrastructure funding and planning - failures and successes - is probably a good topic??

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Reposted by David Dye

David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Two papers by Max Planck, the legendary Nobel laureate in physics, were retracted by Springer Nature in 2011, likely due to an algorithm flagging the papers for self-plagiarism and copyright infringement. Read on for how stupid it all is. 🧪

science.org

Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?

Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck. A bot may be to blame

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Reposted by David Dye

Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 24/06/2026

🔥👠‼️

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David Dye @davedye.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

(I would clarify that I don’t include EDF’s Franco-German EPR design in ‘we’ in my previous statement…)

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Yeah, I know. AECC is lavishly staffed with many very good people. I see no good reason why we should keep our competitive advantage. Still, rockin’ on, tho! We’re also pretty good at nuclear; I’d back us, tbh.

Oh, I would disagree. We have a substantial competitive moat in wings and jet engines that no-one outside of Boeing in Seattle, GE in Ohio and Pratt in Connecticut can replicate. It takes continuous reinvestment to keep our edge, but just like ASML, we know how to do stuff…

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I would argue that part of the British disease is that the landed gentry and financial markets were always traders and colonialists - the London markets were never interested in investing in domestic industry.

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Yeah, a Prof here and colleague of mine was pretty much the only kid from his high school in the West Midlands to go on to A level. I have a Welsh PhD student who commuted 40 mins to England to do A levels, as she couldn’t do A levels in her town. We have some real issues to address…

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Like, in aerospace there are a lot of big old gas furnaces that I’m itching to replace with better insulated, more precise electric furnaces.

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GB Electricity Bills — Breakdown & Wholesale Monitor

This is the problem to work on: www.electricitybills.uk. We need to move costs onto gas and help industry invest to transition - like electric trucks and buses, electrification can yield to big £££ savings on process heat.

electricitybills.uk

Interactive breakdown of UK household energy bills, wholesale price tracking, and price cap prediction.

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There’s lots of worry about AI and graduate jobs, but for Imperial Engineering at least, the outcomes still seem favourable 6 months after graduation. The traditional graduate recruitment model seems to be pretty broken, though.

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It’s really hard to beat the much lower cost of capital in China, and for energy-intensive primary processing the capital-energy combo Qatar. We’ve got to figure out how to build/grow the ecosystems that give us sustainable competitive advantage, like the ones we have aerospace and luxury cars

It’s not been as bad as feared, for sure, but we’ve still lost a lot of Ford in Dagenham and Honda in Swindon, and BMW now have a 2nd Mini plant in Europe. And yes, the broader point on the import shock in progress from Chinese EV, just like Japanese cars in the 80s, is also real.

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Most of the 2016 branch plant car industry - Nissan, Toyota and Honda - made EU-wide cars. Eg We make Corolla’s, France & Czechia make Yaris’ and Aygos. But reinvestment in new models, which are EVs, is a 10y cycle. If we can’t export to the EU, game over. Nowt to do with China or UK net zero policy

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A lot of the problems we have with upskilling and building regs compliance and construction trades starts with incentives and the tax system. We try and get there with enforcement but the system design is just bad…

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But what you can’t then do is have apprentices; add in all the extra insurance and compliance stuff, and that most will move on shortly after you’ve trained them, and it’s becomes pretty impossible.

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The VAT threshold is so high it’s worth staying under it; get your customers to buy materials direct and subcontract any extra work to other sole traders. If you do a bit of salaried work on the side for a big contractor it can work out; lots of trades do this.

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