China started construction on an estimated 95 GW of new coal power capacity in 2024 it accounted for 93% of new global coal-power construction BUT, importantly, Coal power's share in the electricity mix has steadily declined, dropping from around 73% in 2016 to 51% in June 2025 heavily driven by renewables push in China
China's average utilisation rate of coal power plants in 2024 was around 50% meaning there's already spare capacity. The continued building is driven largely by energy security concerns, financial incentives for coal-mining conglomerates, and institutional momentum. The most immediate trigger was power shortages of 2021, when factories had to cut production due to blackouts. That was politically embarrassing, so provincial governments and energy companies rushed to approve new coal capacity as an insurance policy. More than 100 billion yuan in capacity payments were made to coal plants in 2024 essentially the government paying plants just to exist after all half the capacity isn't being used.
Chinese policy makers have plans to "strictly control" coal use during the current period and start phasing down coal use during the 15th Five-Year Plan period covering 2026–2030. China also has a long-stated goal of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. which probably explains the apparent paradox of being world leaders in renewables but investing more in Coal than anyone else. usual caveats notwithstanding
When see things like this, I always think of the Chinese proverb
"An inch of time is worth an inch of gold, but it is hard to buy one inch of time with one inch of gold"
Which always says to me that its not worth it just use the quickest option
Take the example drcongo posted:
"Yesterday I had to drive to a nearby town, just 20 minutes away, and noticed that every single petrol station there was a good 5p per litre cheaper than my town. I might plug this into a map."
Assume he uses 30 litres a week (high end of average UK usage) that's £1.50 per week saving but assume the extra miles use half a litre, that takes about 65 p off the saving (ill not go into wear and tear) over 30 years of work 50 weeks a year this means a saving of £1,275 over 30 years ... sounds a lot but
20 mins away - this assumes 40 minutes per week over 50 weeks is 2000 minutes, and over 30 years 60000 minutes. Now assume you are awake for 16 hours a day this equates to 62.5 days of free time - more than two months of awake time
so as the saying goes... which would you prefer £1,275 saving or 62.5 days of time
I almost never go out of my way for fuel, because as you say, it's rarely worth it once you factor in your time (never mind the fuel spent).
But it's still useful to know about price variation so that you can plan ahead. I regularly drive past several different petrol stations, and if I know that one of them is usually cheaper or usually more expensive then I choose to use or avoid it, or to decide that I'll fill up tomorrow when I'm going that way rather than today at a more expensive one.
And that'd be more useful built into satnav, so that if I know I have to fill up somewhere along my route then I can pick the cheapest place, since there's no real time cost to any of the options compared to each other.
totally agree, technology could make this much more cost effective (or time effective). what's the best use of my time versus the cheaper option..
It's interesting running the numbers though. e.g. if it only take 10 minutes to get cheaper fuel, how much cheaper does it need to be for your time to be worth more than the UK minimum wage (£12.21 for adults over 21)
based on my maths (from above calculations) it needs to be about 7p per litre cheaper to justify the extra 10 minutes and for your time to be worth more, per hour, than the minimum wage.
I once had the idea to do something like this, though the intention was to pitch it to gas station operators as a way to keep their prices competitive (i.e. alert them when the station down the street drops their prices so that they can too and not lose business to casual price shoppers or, alternatively, when the station down the street raises their prices, so that you can too and not lose revenue needlessly) and learned that there are a couple entities, at least in the US, that have national data here. I couldn't even figure out how to contact one, and when I called the other I was essentially laughed off the phone by someone with a VERY New York accent -- it seems from context that their data is VERY expensive and used by Wall St. types, so the idea of some nobody from flyover country essentially reselling it to mom & pop gas station operators was funny, and out of the question.
Also depends on the size of your fuel tank and how full it already is. The time taken to refuel is (almost) the same regardless, but if you've got a 40l fuel tank vs a 70l one or you're only half-empty then it's going to be less worthwhile.
7p cheaper for 10 minutes works out at about minimum wage if you're buying 30 litres, but with a bigger car you could easily be buying twice that, which works out much better.
Although of course you also need to factor in how much fuel you burn driving to the cheaper place, and the extra wear and depreciation on the car. If you take the HMRC standard rate of 45p/mile (which was meant to cover all of that kind of thing, but hasn't been updated for years) then even going a few miles out of your way quickly ends up costing more than it's likely to save.
mostly such tools are useful when you go very close to a few petrol stations on your regular routes anyway. I can pretty much time topups for when the cheapest station locally is en-route to my destination
A 7p per litre difference does sound like the difference between local station and motorway prices though, and they probably will have factored in that opportunity cost of time...
> A 7p per litre difference does sound like the difference between local station and motorway prices though, and they probably will have factored in that opportunity cost of time...
Only 7p?
Motorway services have shocking price markups, way more than 7p. Most people don't realise this or are just too lazy to find something that isn't quite as convenient.
Unleaded is 131.80p (UK wide) and 156.80p (Motorway Service Area).
That's nearly a 20% markup.
Last time I drove into a motorway services and saw prices ~20p/litre higher I just drove through the petrol station and found a local garage to fill up at.
Petrol in the U.K. is insanely cheap. When I passed my test I could buy 4.5 litres with an hours work at minimum wage, which would get me about 30 miles. Today an hour at minimum wage gets me 9.4 litres and takes me over 100 miles.
Spending an extra £10 once or twice a year when driving a few hundred miles and thus needing to fill up at a motorway is nothing. Chances are I’m spending that much on an overpriced coffee when I do that anyway.
It’s not a matter of “quite as convenient”, it’s a matter of figuring where you are, find a nearby town, finding a petrol station in it and getting back to the motorway. This can take well over half an hour. Time that you really need to be spending getting to your destination because there’s a good chance your trip is going to take most of the day.
Sure. Now imagine your car’s GPS knows you have 60 miles in the tank, and your journey is 300 miles. It can query the APO and figure out what the best petrol station to refuel on your journey is.
Driving somewhere to fill the tank 5p/l cheaper probably waste of time but unless all your trips are very short you usually can find a petrol station along a commute roue or along the route of a long leisure trip which is cheaper than one closest to your home. When you see prices in your navigator it's much easier to do.
Agreed. Most of the time the cost of driving out of your way exceeds the saving you would make. However, there's a fuel station near me that is 19.8% cheaper than one only 1.6 miles away from it, and that's a thing that is worth knowing.
As someone who waits until my tank is almost empty, to visit Costco one per month for a fill-up, despite it being 5 miles away, I understand your point.
However, I think (and hope) the point of this service is that by being public, it'll drive prices down for drivers.
I drive 10 miles round-trip once per month to save what I guesstimate is £5 on a tank of fuel, then spend £100-300 in the Costco store while I'm there. I'm not the target audience, but I hope that for those who drive regularly, or for a living, this can help route them to where they can get the best prices as they're passing by.
It would be really nice if say apple maps on my phone when connected to airplay could get the Fuel level in my car and distance to empty, and then when you plug in a route, and press add a gas station to my route, it picks the best one based on time out of the way, how much fuel you have left, and best relative price. ideally you could set your preferences in the app (e.g. never more than 5min out of the way, below median price if less than 1/8 tank, lowest quintile price if >1/8 tank etc.
Driving 40 minutes to save 5p might not be worth it. What does make more sense (at least where I live) is to go to the petrol station in the late afternoon or evening instead of the morning hours. The intraday price span on most regular fuels is usually 10 Euro cents per liter. Weekends also tend to be cheaper.
That's an extreme case though, and not what this sort of thing is aimed at.
Here in Perth, Western Australia, it's common for pump prices to vary significantly even within a small radius. But they're all on https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/ so you can see what the price is ahead of time.
If it's 14c cheaper per litre (coming up for 10%) to go 500m one direction vs 500m another direction, which one are you going to choose?
I've also wondered about whether to fully fill my tank or drive on a small amount so that I'm not using fuel to carry fuel. Do you know of any metrics on that?
I haven't made any calculations, and it's more a hunch, but considering you usually need to remove hundreds of KG in order to make an impact on how much fuel is being spent, 40-50L of gas (~40KG difference between full and empty maybe?) would have an marginal effect on how much fuel is spent to carry a full tank vs 10% filled tank.
Besides, with a smaller tank, you'll make more trips to tank it, and also have less choice to go to gas stations that are further away but have cheaper price. Then again it becomes a question of "Do I want more time or more money?", back to square one :)
Edit: Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the fuel pump use fuel itself as a coolant or something? Never investigated myself, but some car-knower once told me that running the tank on low always isn't good for the fuel pump, or something like that. If that's true, running with 10% of the fuel would mean more maintenance too, potentially removing any savings in the first place.
> Never investigated myself, but some car-knower once told me that running the tank on low always isn't good for the fuel pump, or something like that.
The main issue is that it risks pulling detritus from the very bottom of the fuel tank, usually a bigger issue in diesels and I suspect less of a problem these days.
Yeah, fair enough, I think what he mentioned though, wasn't just about fuel going through the pump being used as coolant, but some extra process that only happens when you're not running below say 10% or whatever, an extra cooling process that only runs when you're not low on fuel. Maybe I misunderstood him though and it's just about the liquid passing through.
I think the fuel passing through is the only method that could be used to cool, the volume of fuel required is presumably constant, regardless of how much fuel you have left, so the amount passing through the pump should be the same until you run out.
On a related note, my car has a fuel heater, to pre-heat the Diesel before it hits the engine, I assume this is typical in modern cars, but using the fuel as a coolant would presumably contribute positively to this desire for warmer fuel entering the cylinders.
If your priority is the journey to fill a car with fuel and time spent doing so, surely just buy a Battery Electric Vehicle and then this problem evaporates because it just plugs in like every other appliance you own rather than needing a trip to a fuel station.
Shopping around for the fuel of an EV you can do from a web browser, oh hey, Octopus have a good deal for night charging, click click done.
The typical use case is probably much more like deciding which station within half a mile of home is cheapest, and that could easily be a variance of 5p or more.
this seems reasonable but isn't the conclusion a statement what we already know. These tools are really powerful, but with the ability to cause significant pain, need organisations to adapt, so that they can make best use of them but this is fraught with security problems. AI looks a lot like a technology problem but ultimately, to most small businesses, it's a procurement and change management problem.
Also (I appreciate the authors message here but..)
"Excel on the finance side is remarkably limiting when you start getting used to the power of a full programming ecosystem like Python"
With the addition of lambdas Excel formulae are Turing complete. no more need for VBA in a (mostly) functional environment.
Also on this, Claude for Excel needs a lot of work (as does any tool working with financial models) if you have ever used them in anger I dont think you'll be relying on them with your non-technical finance manager for a while...
my 83 year old mother was able to use (almost) all the features of iOS when she first got an iPhone, in 2012. It genuinely changed her life and meant she could participate in a world I dont think she ever expected to be comfortable in. She tried and failed to use a PC for years. Local library lessons, family time (and patience) etc, but she always needed support. the iPhone as different, it was simple to use with familiar user interactions with every app. Roll forwards to 2025, gradually bit by unnecessary bit bells, whistles and complexity has bled in from every angle. Last week I did a FaceTime call with her to help her log in to an app on her phone. She can do it fine on her iPad that hasn't been updated. this was like going back to her PC days - too complicated and giving her features she didn't ask for, or need.
what was it Steve Jobs said?
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer — so what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. Sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
I've worked at companies that don't really have to sell on features. The product people still come up with new ideas constantly and don't pay attention to the quality. Heck, engineers will gin up new systems to build if they're bored.
For marketing reasons (and App Store predatory capture) they decided to make the iPhone more like a computer. Yet I do not know a single "normal" iOS user who actually make use of all the stuff. They all ask me to do stuff on a "real" computer". Meanwhile I know how to use the "advanced" iOS bits but it is so convoluted and slow that I would rather not.
Special mention to "files management" with the most retarded counter-intuitive behavior one could think of. Even when you know how it will behave, it still feels like a mystery how you are going to find back your files. Especially since the "Files" app always open up to some random unexpected place.
They tried to "copy" Android more powerful features but failed because they want too much control and are insane with "security". Yet iOS lack the simplicity it once had. And iPadOS is still a joke as a real computer OS alternative.
ive always wondered why, in "day stay" car parks (commuters etc) they dont have 6 to 8 cables from a charging point that can all connect to different cars and then do round robin charging. This solves the problem of one person being connected all day and preventing others from benefitting. This way a number of cars can be charged up without the inconvenience of just one person being constantly connected. We have chargers at work where this solution would prevent all the car shuffling and aggro associated with people managing access. in our case 3 cars could charge in a day, so 3 cables available to three spaces and charging done round robin. Probably not a novel idea but one id like to see implemented
This is a very solved problem. EV chargers can change the rate at which the car is charging.
I have a double-charger at home. If I plug in one car, it gets 40 amps. When I plug in two, both cars get 20 amps until one finishes, then it does a 32/8 split with the charging car getting 32 amps and the idle car getting 8 amps.
This is already built in to commercial EV chargers. Chargepoint (brand I’ve worked with the most) allows you to do pretty much anything you can think of related to power splitting/sharing. The units I’ve sold are either single or dual feed, so power sharing is between two cars on a single charger.
Im not sure that's the case, they've been doing MR-G watches for a long time (29 years) as a push upmarket. Just look at the latest GW-BX5600 (released in 3 days) it has a new MIP LCD panel on a new module. This retails for $150 .. no doubt the module will be put in much more expensive watches but one thing Casio continues to do is produce good value digital watches and at the lower price points. im hoping they add a model like the 5600u, with this module, with a screw in case back and higher quality resin. Also, my current favourite is the JDM yellow (original style) LCD F-91W. That was released 4 years ago and cost me $11 plus shipping. long live Casio!
what happens if access is unrestricted from UK users and the content becomes available again. Reads to me that they will monitor sites to ensure this doesn't happen. Surely logical..
just a quick point here; 1.2K is highly statistically significant, even for a national level poll/survey. The issue here is the potential for selection bias, which seems primarily to be driven by people who want to do the survey not sure how this ultimately skews the results but 1.2K is easily an adequate sample size
China started construction on an estimated 95 GW of new coal power capacity in 2024 it accounted for 93% of new global coal-power construction BUT, importantly, Coal power's share in the electricity mix has steadily declined, dropping from around 73% in 2016 to 51% in June 2025 heavily driven by renewables push in China
China's average utilisation rate of coal power plants in 2024 was around 50% meaning there's already spare capacity. The continued building is driven largely by energy security concerns, financial incentives for coal-mining conglomerates, and institutional momentum. The most immediate trigger was power shortages of 2021, when factories had to cut production due to blackouts. That was politically embarrassing, so provincial governments and energy companies rushed to approve new coal capacity as an insurance policy. More than 100 billion yuan in capacity payments were made to coal plants in 2024 essentially the government paying plants just to exist after all half the capacity isn't being used.
Chinese policy makers have plans to "strictly control" coal use during the current period and start phasing down coal use during the 15th Five-Year Plan period covering 2026–2030. China also has a long-stated goal of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. which probably explains the apparent paradox of being world leaders in renewables but investing more in Coal than anyone else. usual caveats notwithstanding