Magnus Davidson

Personal account - views all mine.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

This watches exactly like the My Aim is True essay reads.

[Le Bernardin @LeBernardinNY]

Have you ever wondered what our fish butcher Justo Thomas's morning looks like? We gave him a pair of @Meta Glasses to find out.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

@BlackIslePMD @serenelyjoyful Not a fan of their styles. Mcalpine’s was the better argument but still pretty hollow.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

@BlackIslePMD @serenelyjoyful I managed to get half way through before having to turn it off but that point stood out.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

Anyway I’m meant to be retired from social media but every so often something piques an interest.

The north Highlands have continued to depopulate for 150 years. That should be fixed.

Hopefully this answer annoys everyone with a hot take on the issue.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

The clearances had some relatively well evidenced ethnic underpinnings which have led to some good academic work in its context of internal colonialism and the British imperial state.

[Harold MacWOKE @Pies_of_Lee]

the highland clearances were basically just the scottish version of the enclosures in england. they were to make way for capitalist development, not an ethnic genocide lol stop the larp

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

For its faults the UK Government rolled out some very impactful late 19th, early 20th century land reform legislation not yet seen under devolution. To Johnston’s power from the glens, the HIDB, and Forsyth’s UHI.

Devolution was meant to see to the rest but hasn’t.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

There’s still 100 miles and a couple of Harry Gows buffer until we hit the Caithness utopia of only independent bakeries.

[lewis @elbiemit]

The most northernly Greggs has opened today. I am watching our culture erode in real time.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

@lmartods We’ve got this in Caithness. Train comes into Georgmas. Reverses into Thurso, back to Georgmas, the onto Wick. Vice versa on the way south. If you get on in Thurso you should sit rear facing so that you’re then front facing for the vast majority of the of the route.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

Comments here on AR8 and AR9 sound relatively foreboding for Scottish offshore wind.

[Dan Tomlinson MP @dantomlinsonmp]

This Budget is the start of a new energy pathway that the 10 Year Plan will build on. The priority is to bring energy costs down to help British business to compete, and British households to cope. And cheaper electricity will boost electrification, increasing our energy security and helping to decarbonise the whole economy.

What does this mean? First, it means a focus on levies and policy costs on bills. The Conservatives added £100 to everyone's bill via levies in their last decade in power. Labour has cut £150 from bill costs already. But today, John Healey has drawn a line in the sand, with the announcement that we will add no new costs to energy bills, with a comprehensive cost control framework to follow at the spending review. The Chancellor is also junking plans, first set out by the Tories, to add on up to around £10 a year on bills to pay for hydrogen projects.

Second, it means taking account of the interaction between the pace of grid build-out and the pace at which renewables are added to the grid. The NAO have said that investment in expanding the transmission network declined in real terms between 2016 and 2020, just when it was clear that more intermittent power meant we would need more capacity. It is now forecast to rise to over £10bn a year. But with growing constraint and distribution costs, it's right that the system costs of all new power are considered. That is why we will only procure clean power through AR8 (the next auction round) if we are confident it will lower bills. And we will reform the contract for difference by AR9 to support building the lowest cost system, fixing market distortions and siting assets in the right place.
The evidence is clear, clean power is an essential part of the route to cheap power, and the overall approach of seeking to get ourselves off the gas-price rollercoaster to the right one. Gas is setting the electricity price less and less every year. If it wasn't for adding renewables to the grid in recent years then the current Iran price shock would have been worse for families and businesses. The Conservatives and Reform's ideological anti-renewables approach is the wrong one and fails in the face of evidence on how to protect bill payers from shocks and the need to make ourselves less reliant on foreign dictators. We'll take a pragmatic approach to get bills down.

Getting electricity prices down, ensuring new clean power does not run ahead of the grid, is also the credible route to reaching our net zero goals. The decarbonisation that we want to enable in our homes, on our roads and in our businesses, is six times larger than that still to be achieved from getting to a clean grid. Unless we make electricity cheaper relative to other energy sources, we will struggle to increase adoption of EV and heat pumps.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

@WuGMFC @andywightman Platform/s just outside the limit but it’s the only field that can be found within.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

So the site was both the centre of UK fast breeder reactor research and development with full lifecycle capability (fuel fab and processing) *and also provided power to the glens.*

DFR could power a town larger than Thurso and PFR a city larger than Aberdeen.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

A few people unhappy with the power in the glens statement, but the site was R&D with electricity as a ‘byproduct’, but it was grid connected and DFR exported 600GWh in 15 years. Fine for an experimental reactor at 15MWe. PFR was plagued with some early issues but achieved,

[Jamie Stone MP @Jamie4North]

We must not forget that Dounreay helped keep the lights on in the glens.

We have the site, the skills and the community to host a small modular reactor. The Scottish Government must move beyond outdated policies and unlock Highland energy opportunities.

https://t.co/RSWPkyB8eo

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

better capacity factors in final years, 80% in its final year which lends support to the idea it should have been let to run a bit longer. A prototype reactor that appeared to come good in later years for export at 9,250GWh. Providing power to the glens…

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

@BlackIslePMD @ewangibbs 20 minute walk from Wick train station to Wick airport. We should build a tram to connect the two.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

@des_mansfield At luring people in and gives somewhat of an equal, perhaps not equitable, opportunity. The problem is elements of market failure and not being able to build with a profit margin. State needs to step in with a different model to the south.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

Great work. Headline figures of population growth in Highland over the last few decades are relatively superficial and focussed on the Inner Moray Firth.

The periphery continues to depopulate and sustainability is stymied by an ageing population and headline regional numbers.

[Peter MacDonald @BlackIslePMD]

On holiday, so took a look at the young family population (via primary school roll) trend across the Highlands. This video is basically just stepping through some pretty concerning data, both on the values and the trends.

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

@des_mansfield On the first point Covid lockdown was an interesting experiment and modelling suggests it’s likely to help headline figures in the next decade or so but doesn’t solve the looming demographic challenge. I’m not convinced you even need to give them away, market price should suffice

[Magnus Davidson @DavidsonMagnus]

@BlackIslePMD @JohnNisbet7 Some interesting pieces in the Atlantic, NYT, FT, New Statesmen etc over the last few years but I think pro-natalism is perceived as reactionary/conservative.

For his faults Bastani has been one of the few voices in the, arguable, left communicating the issue in the online UK.