May be of interest to some of you!

Paul Boyd wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk:

Looks lovely but I thought there were a shed load of class 58s and some class 60s parked up doing nothing?

Suggest it's a lot lot cheaper to spot hire RSG than it is to recomission a box/bone..

Rob.

"news.plus.net" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk:

Probably correct but the time was when the various companies would have one or two ready to go as spares. Just a thought.

I'm afraid the world is run by accountants.....shortly we will run out of electricity generation capacity because there is no spare.

Rob.

Owned by DBS who don't want to give the competition any help. A lot of the 58's are in Europe building high speed lines as well. There are a few 66's laid up as well.

People don't want nuclear power plants, they don't want coal-burning plants and they don't want wind farms and their associated power lines, but they still want unlimited cheap electricity. What's the solution?

Apparently the solution to all of our "green" concerns is to drive electric cars. Oh, hang on a minute, we don't actually want to generate more electricity because it's dirty and unsightly. It always seems to be the green brigade that object to greener forms of generating electricity!

Home Inverters powered by massed banks of AA dry cells bought off Ebay, Amazon etc delivered by Donkey Carts. These are part of the worldwide Donkey Hauled Logistics group once known as DHL.

G.Harman

Magic.

Wolf K.

A mixture of things, probably led by the Severn barrage

Some would be quite happy!

Because they don't solve anything and require huge subsidies.

Put all the objectors on a special tarrif with smart meters that cut them off when the wind isn't blowing.

MBQ

Charged overnight by cheap "off-peak" electricity. Oh, hang-on, there'll be so much demand that there will no longer be any off-peak electricity.

MBQ

Fantastic! Not a lot more I can say! Badger.

Who cares what people want? Just generate electricity in such a way that all demand is met. No subsidies, though, and charge appropriately so that those who want expensively generated electricity pay through the nose for it.

By "no subsidies", do you also mean "no indirect subsidies", as for example, ending the indirect subsidy of allowing fossil fuel users to avoid paying for the health care costs they inflict on the rest of us? If so, I'm with you.

Wolf K.

Inverters powered by solar panels so they will have to do all the travel at night so the cars can be charged when the Sun's out. Hey that would work with electric railways in the daytime.

A lot of people object to wind turbines as well

On Thu, 2 Jun 2011 19:52:26 +0100, Wolf K wrote

"The rest of us..." So you don't use ANY fossil fuels?

Of course I do. But the price does not express the true costs. Most of the cost is "externalised", which Milton Friedman and other econotwits largely ignored. In fact, Friedmanites advise businesses to externalise as much of their cost as possible. Fortunately, their influence is beginning to wane.

These externalities are the indirect subsidies I refer to. They distort the market. The question always is, Whom do these subsidies benefit? The answer is, Follow the money.

Have you not noticed that when a politician is in favour of a subsidy, he calls it an "investment", and when he opposes it, he calls it a "cost"?

Etc. OT for this group.

Wolf K.