And indeed, in the case of the train companies, the government (so us, in effect) pays for new rolling stock for the private rail companies – and then pays the private rail companies a subsidy to run it.

Or, how about one of Branson's greatest wheezes?
He persuaded the fat controller that the West Coast line needed to be upgraded for his new trains to run on it.
This was agreed and we (yes we) paid for it to be upgraded.
But the upgrade caused disruption and ... you've guessed it ... Virgin were compensated for the consequent delays to their trains.
All the while receiving eye-watering subsidies to run the trains in the first place.

East Coast trains (used to be National Express and before that was GNER) is nowadays owned by the Dept of Transport.
And it's around 50 quid cheaper to go from Leeds to London (open return) via publicly-owned East Coast than it is from Manchester to London via the efficient and privatised West Coast mainline.

Now remind me again why privatisation was such a great idea?

"Efficiency" is one of those vague words that are often thrown into debate to mislead. People have strived to make the best use of their time since the dawn of man. Indeed, you could argue that it is one of the reasons human beings as a species have been so successful. That said, the modern Cult of Efficiency (which arose around the turn of the last century with the introduction of huge assembly lines and megafactories) is something more than a simple equation of economics. It's [iideological[/i and defined by its own peculiar set of metrics which should be understood more by what is[i left out of the equation[/i than vice versa. So, a police department can be said to be more "efficient" by cutting 20% of its workforce. But the equation says nothing about the costs that are now transferred over to the public.

It's the same with buses. The first thing a company does after privatisation is cut loss-making routes. The metrics say it is now more "efficient" whilst staying completely silent over people left stuck in a dangerous city past 11:00pm.

Accepting all the points made above about privatisation. Might I offer an explaination as to why prices have gone up so much.

The processing of clean, potable water requires a phenomenal quantity of energy. IIRC Thames Water are the largest consumer of electricity in the Thames Valley and given the large increases in wholesale energy prices, an increase in water bills when the 5 year deal was renegotiated was inevitable. I know for a fact that water companies invest substantially in reducing their energy consumption and this in some respect is offsetting the increase compared to that for electrical power.

We could get started on the privatisation of the power industry now...

These water companies who own all of the water courses in the country and spend so much money on electricity making clean water for me to put in my pond - couldn't they make their own electricity, for free, you know, from the water courses they own ?

Sadly there isn't enough motive power in the UK's watercourse to generate the energy required to purify our water. There are other things the water company are doing

[urlhttp://www.thameswater.co.uk/cps/rde/xchg/corp/hs.xsl/9849.htm#[/url

It's a good old fashioned 'where there's muck there's brass' story.

From memory it was so the government could put the money of the sell-offs into their country's coffers for the benefit of us all. And provide competition that would help keep the costs of the products down. For the benefit of us all.

Is that not the case? [size=85(I'm guessing I'd use the sarcasm emoticon here, but can't find it).[/size



I just realised from schoolboy german where the word Koffer may come from.

Fair point. McLF. Watched a programme on BBC Knowledge over here the other day about wave technology and how brilliant it is.

I've always been of the opinion that necessity company's should be nationally owned, utilities, public transport, farming industry.

The only worry i have with those though is instead of the private companies ripping us off to pay their shareholders and cream off a tidy pay for their directors is the unions holding us by the baby factories whenever they want a way over inflation pay rate and then threatening strikes when they don't paid way more than they worth, <cough> tube workers <cough>
The only thing i like about that is the little man ripping me off is easier to take than the already rich.

I have often wondered about this. For example, having some idea of the tremendous weight that water has, and having watched rivers eg the Aire in spate at Saltaire, I often think of just how much power there must be passing by per second. So multiply that by the UK, and whichever way you look at it, it must surely be a monumental untapped (sorry!) resource.

But how much motive power is there? I am no scientist, nor mathematician but somebody must have worked it out, in order to say there isn't enough motive power. I am not disputing that answer, but the fact there isn't enough ain't the point, why don't we tap into this free resource more than we do?

Anyway some of you who do maths may be able to help. On the back of my fag packet it says that average rainfall is broadly speaking 1 litre; the approx area of the UK is 250,000 sq km; I have no clue what the average height above sea level is, but if it was for the sake of argument 10m, then on average, wouldn't the annual motive power nominally available be the amount it would take to raise that volume of water to that height? And what would that figure be?

[url=http://images5.cpcache.com/product/115511515v2_460x460_Front.jpgI have the answer ...[/url

Quote ="Ferocious Aardvark"I have often wondered about this. For example, having some idea of the tremendous weight that water has, and having watched rivers eg the Aire in spate at Saltaire, I often think of just how much power there must be passing by per second. So multiply that by the UK, and whichever way you look at it, it must surely be a monumental untapped (sorry!) resource. But how much motive power is there? I am no scientist, nor mathematician but somebody must have worked it out, in order to say there isn't enough motive power. I am not disputing that answer, but the fact there isn't enough ain't the point, why don't we tap into this free resource more than we do? Anyway some of you who do maths may be able to help. On the back of my fag packet it says that average rainfall is broadly speaking 1 litre; the approx area of the UK is 250,000 sq km; I have no clue what the average height above sea level is, but if it was for the sake of argument 10m, then on average, wouldn't the annual motive power nominally available be the amount it would take to raise that volume of water to that height? And what would that figure be?'" The UK doesn't have the necessary river volumes, consistent flow rates, natural storage (lakes etc.), or natural drops for large scale hydroelectric power generation. There are a handful of decent sized hydro power stations, one in Wales and the others in Scotland. All but one of them (IIRC) use a storage method where excess capacity in the Grid is used to pump water uphill to a reservoir of some sort and then during peak demand that water is allowed to flow back downhill through the turbines. As you can tell the net contribution is zero - it just helps balance peak load. There are a fair number of small scale hydro power developments that provide power for a residence, busines, or maybe small community. That's pretty much the limit. We could use more of these schemes but we're never going to generate a significant amount of hydroelectric power in the UK - we simply don't have the geography for it. A couple of links for those interested: www.british-hydro.org/index.html www.reuk.co.uk/UK-Hydro-Power-Stations.htm

Quote ="Ferocious Aardvark"I have often wondered about this. For example, having some idea of the tremendous weight that water has, and having watched rivers eg the Aire in spate at Saltaire, I often think of just how much power there must be passing by per second. So multiply that by the UK, and whichever way you look at it, it must surely be a monumental untapped (sorry!) resource. But how much motive power is there? I am no scientist, nor mathematician but somebody must have worked it out, in order to say there isn't enough motive power. I am not disputing that answer, but the fact there isn't enough ain't the point, why don't we tap into this free resource more than we do? Anyway some of you who do maths may be able to help. On the back of my fag packet it says that average rainfall is broadly speaking 1 litre; the approx area of the UK is 250,000 sq km; I have no clue what the average height above sea level is, but if it was for the sake of argument 10m, then on average, wouldn't the annual motive power nominally available be the amount it would take to raise that volume of water to that height? And what would that figure be?'" The UK doesn't have the necessary river volumes, consistent flow rates, natural storage (lakes etc.), or natural drops for large scale hydroelectric power generation. There are a handful of decent sized hydro power stations, one in Wales and the others in Scotland. All but one of them (IIRC) use a storage method where excess capacity in the Grid is used to pump water uphill to a reservoir of some sort and then during peak demand that water is allowed to flow back downhill through the turbines. As you can tell the net contribution is zero - it just helps balance peak load. There are a fair number of small scale hydro power developments that provide power for a residence, busines, or maybe small community. That's pretty much the limit. We could use more of these schemes but we're never going to generate a significant amount of hydroelectric power in the UK - we simply don't have the geography for it. A couple of links for those interested: www.british-hydro.org/index.html www.reuk.co.uk/UK-Hydro-Power-Stations.htm

So is the issue then an inability to meaningfully store up hydro-generated electric power, when generated?

You see, I can easily see a system whereby a whole bunch of electricity could be generated by installing turbines to tap into the strong flow of water down the Aire at Saltaire (or wherever). This electricity if fed into the grid would reduce the need to generate it by burning fossil fuels to an equivalent amount.

On a more epic scale, one resource the British Isles has is we are in the middle of a set of very tidal seas, and almost 24/7 there is an unstoppable flow of trillions of gallons of water either coming in or going out. Surely, if we could harness the power of nothing more than the flow of water, which will flow whether we harness it or not, it would generate a very significant amount?

OK, so I'll have a punt at this. You can challenge all of my assumptions as you like.

OK, so 1 litre of water falls on each square cm per year (I think that's your statement). That gives us a pulsating 2.5x10^15 litres of rainfall in the UK per year. (2,500,000,000,000,000 litres).

Nicely enough, that's the same number of kilos of rainfall. OK, so if we with 100% efficiency extract 10m of potential energy from this water (PE = mass x g x height) we get 2.45x10^17 J of energy (per year).

There are 31.5 million seconds in a year, so the power output is 2.45^17 divided by 31.5^6. Which is about 8000MW, or the output of 2-3 coal fired power stations.

Clearly we won't a) get our hands on all the water or b) get 100% efficiency from our mythical PE recovery engine.

I think the key point is that you need the big drop to get the power output through a tubine that would even approach this sort of efficiency.

No. The issue is that just sticking a turbine in a river delivers very little electricity and is impossible to control as the flow in the river is constantly varying. This is why the vast majority of hydro power is delivered by falling water from some sort of reservoir - typically an artificial lake formed by damming a major river.

There are 'run of river' hydro plants that don't use a reservoir (or at most a very small one) but these still require a large river with constant flow and a significant drop in order to ensure sufficient water through the turbine under controllable conditions.


See above. The contribution would be tiny and quite possible outweighed by the environmental and energy costs of building, installing, and maintaining the generators.


Tidal power is a whole different ball game and well worth pursuing. Sadly successive administrations have been swayed by the extremely active wind power lobby and most of the development funding has gone into wind turbines. However, there is now some promising activity in this field and hopefully we can realise it's potential. The UK has nearly 50% of the sites identified as suitable for large-scale tidal arrays in the world (8 out of 20 at last count I think) and some estimates claim that tidal could produce as much as 20% of our energy requirements.

I remember reading articles about hot rocks power in [iNew Scientist[/i, way back in the 1980s: any advances on that or is it unlikely, does anyone know?

Sounds good. It always seemed palpably crazy to me to spend a load of money on the odd wind turbine sticking out of the sea, reliant on nothing but the breeze, when you had the potential for an unbroken line of turbines, taking advantage of a flow of liquid rather than gas which was not only uber reliable, but surely with the potential to produce many factors more units of power per metre of sea bed.

I'll have a google gander but i read somewhere that the machines used to harness tidal power are unreliable and eventually broke and they are currently looking into better more reliable technology before committing to a long term solution on tidal.

All machines eventually break.



Tidal power is technically challenging, which is why so few suitable sites have been identified worldwide. There have been some promising recent developments though. It doesn't help that for years, in the UK at least, research into tidal power has been low on the priority list for Government funding.

Maybe not so unreliable:
[urlhttp://www.marineturbines.com/3/news/article/57/decc_s_greg_barker_backs_marine_current_turbines__plans_for_its_first_tidal_farms/[/url

We've got dozens of those reservoir thingies oop North.

How many of them are on top of mountains or high up in steep river valleys? How many are actually fed by significant rivers rather than being catchments for rain and/or minor rivers and streams? Or spring fed?

If widespread hydro power were feasible in the UK we'd be using it. Just look at the amount of effort and engineering that's gone into the ones in Wales and Scotland - that wouldn't have happened if there were an easier alternative.

Unfortunately they tend to break A LOT quicker when exposed to salt and moisture. At Toyota we had numerous forklifts on long-term lease in seafood factories, canneries, salt distributors etc. Unlike other customers whose trucks we almost never saw returned to the depot for repairs within the five year extended warranty these often lasted no more than a year before manifesting major faults. And when they came back they looked not years but [idecades[/i old. Wheel nuts, load chains, king pins, tie rods etc. were seized solid and usually required the help of burning gear to remove. The lads hated working on them because even simple tasks ended up taking hours to accomplish. Salt is hideous stuff and it wreaks havoc with not just metals but electronic circuitry, too. It was very common to find a truck inoperable because of a dead short within a corroded wiring loom.

Of course, there are materials resilient to salt corrosion. But they tend to be expensive and/or unsuitable for engineering tasks. This is the reason wave energy didn't take off years ago.

I know.


It's one of the reasons. However, engineers have been coping with salt water issues for centuries and none of these problems are insurmountable.