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Paid not to consume electricity...

AJJewsbury

Looks like the scheme is going forward 

Has anyone heard yet the details of how it will work? ... as (even with a smart meter) they can't measure what you don't use so presumably will try to compare with some kind of "normal" - any idea what that "normal" is likely to be? An average across all customers - or what you actually used the same day the previous week or something like?  I'm just wondering if it might allow the unscrupulous to inflate their usage at certain times to claim the extra money at others...

       - Andy.

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  • I think mining technology has moved on a lot since then, with automated plant and less need for actual men to go underground these days.

    It has a bit - but you still need people to maintain the machines - which all works well when coal seams are many feet thick so there's space to work - but that's the easy coal. It's the thinner seams that are much more difficult to work - in Victorian days they could send a man down with a pick to to lie on his side to work the face and could win coal from seams down to about 18" think - but men won't work in such conditions now. and even if you could get a machine small enough to fit you couldn't maintain it effectively. The only option would be to cut far into the surrounding rock to create a much larger tunnel - but then you're having to cut and move a huge amount of rock for a relatively small amount of useful coal - so efficiency and practicality strike again. Quite a few mines survived the 1980s - a few even managed by the miners themselves so had every reason to persist - yet we have not one deep mine left now.

       - Andy.

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  • I think mining technology has moved on a lot since then, with automated plant and less need for actual men to go underground these days.

    It has a bit - but you still need people to maintain the machines - which all works well when coal seams are many feet thick so there's space to work - but that's the easy coal. It's the thinner seams that are much more difficult to work - in Victorian days they could send a man down with a pick to to lie on his side to work the face and could win coal from seams down to about 18" think - but men won't work in such conditions now. and even if you could get a machine small enough to fit you couldn't maintain it effectively. The only option would be to cut far into the surrounding rock to create a much larger tunnel - but then you're having to cut and move a huge amount of rock for a relatively small amount of useful coal - so efficiency and practicality strike again. Quite a few mines survived the 1980s - a few even managed by the miners themselves so had every reason to persist - yet we have not one deep mine left now.

       - Andy.

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