Utopia, you are standing in it!

Electricity transmission [credit: green lantern electric]
Not a new story, but problems are getting worse thanks to net zero obsessions. Why authorise new capacity in areas where transmission lines are known to be inadequate?
– – –
UK consumers are paying hundreds of millions of pounds to turn wind turbines off because the grid cannot deal with how much electricity they make on the windiest days, says Sky News.

The energy regulator Ofgem has told Sky News it is because the grid is “not yet fit for purpose” as the country transitions to a clean power system by 2035.

The National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO), which is responsible for keeping the lights on, has forecast that these “constraint costs”, as they are known, may rise to as much as £2.5bn per year by the middle of this decade before the necessary upgrades are made.

The problem has arisen…

London’s Heathrow airport
The four leading alternatives, from biomass to hydrogen, are expensive and/or would require huge imports or swathes of farmland, we’re told. Another fail for climate obsessives it seems. Is Plan B – choking off demand – on the fanatics’ drawing board yet?
– – –
The quest for guilt-free flying may have been knocked off course by a broad study that has concluded there is “no clear or single net zero alternative to jet fuel”, reports Sky News.

The four most viable alternatives “offer some carbon savings but are not ideal”, according to the review by the Royal Society academy of scientists.

Replacing jet fuel with biomass, for example, would require half the UK’s farmland just to sustain current passenger levels.

But the government is planning for levels to soar by 70% by 2050, representing an additional 200 million passengers.

More than a decade ago now, I got interested in the sovereign debt defaults in the 1930s. Debt was in the wind, between the severe economic recession and financial crisis and the Reinhart and Rogoff book. And so it was while I was working at The Treasury that I first became aware of New Zealand’s sovereign default in the 1930s. A couple of years later that story ended up written up here and our (quite limited) default joined the published lists of sovereign defaults.

The biggest defaults globally weren’t, and often still aren’t, in such lists. I wrote here a few years ago about the US government’s abrogation of gold clauses in debt instruments, in effect depriving bondholders of a big chunk of their real purchasing power, all as written up in UCLA economist Sebastian Edwards’s accessible book.

But on a global scale the most important series of defaults in…

In the Sunday Star-Times yesterday there was a double-page spread in which various moderately prominent people (all apparently “leading speakers” at some “annual University of Waikato economic forum” this week were given 100 to 150 words to tell us “How can NZ build back following a string of serious economic and social setbacks”.

Most of the contributions were pretty underwhelming to say the least. To be fair, 150 words isn’t a lot, but real insight tends to shine through and there wasn’t much on offer in this selection. But then, who really cares much what the chief executive of the Criminal Cases Review Commission or the co-founder of an advertising agency think on such issues.

By contrast, Paul Conway is a statutory office-holder in an economic field. He is the (relatively new) chief economist of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and in that capacity has been appointed by the…