Ben Shafran
benshaf.bsky.social
Ben Shafran
@benshaf.bsky.social
Mostly reading, occasionally responding to posts. My professional content is on LinkedIn
“Certainty” is also not a standard that we hold anything else in life to
November 19, 2025 at 10:13 AM
It’s a problem we see across the economy: es.catapult.org.uk/insight/mixe...
November 5, 2025 at 12:43 PM
I didn’t know the New Statesman was doing comedy bits
September 20, 2025 at 3:20 PM
I genuinely cannot think of any organisation whose primary interest is climate change, who came out against locational pricing.

My original point was that broad-brush characterising of the two sides bared little resemblance to who’s involved. Hard to argue statutory bodies are insurgents
April 24, 2025 at 10:20 AM
Both E3G and TBI have expressed support for zonal. As has the Social Market Foundation. (And of course Energy Systems Catapult - probably the earliest advocate for pricing reform)
April 24, 2025 at 9:29 AM
Interesting perspective, although of course zonal is already a compromise given the earlier efforts to kill nodal pricing

I find it weird to suggest that Ofgem, NESO and Citizens Advice - all in favour of zonal - represent “insurgency”. Or that the anti side cares more about climate change
April 24, 2025 at 9:12 AM
I wonder how much the connections queue is a barrier to businesses just doing it
March 3, 2025 at 9:47 PM
What would be a contrarian but legitimate case for the trade from a Mavs perspective?
February 2, 2025 at 11:25 AM
The level, and allocation. I don’t think anyone is seriously arguing that you should or, in fact, could completely build out constrains
December 20, 2024 at 3:07 PM
The funny thing is, I think most investors do take the idea of regulatory independence seriously. It’s the regulators and politicians who seem to have forgotten why independence mattered in the first place (then again, DESNZ and Ofgem regularly forget what they did 3 years ago…)
December 19, 2024 at 7:18 PM
Regulators sway with political winds, and seemingly more so in recent years. Ofgem disregarded 30 years of regulatory best practice so that they could bear down on network costs in RIIO-2; now it’s swinging the other way and allowing huge increases in investment for RIIO-3
December 19, 2024 at 11:32 AM
My hunch - not tested - is that to achieve mass market you need to move from trying to prefect the system for each property (chasing the highest COP) to standardised “archetypes” that are good enough. If you do that, I think you unlock savings on system design & installation
December 11, 2024 at 3:24 PM
I asked the technical experts at @energysyscat.bsky.social and they reckon it’s probably the result of more installations at smaller properties, since the cost per kWh does not scale down linearly with system size
December 11, 2024 at 2:47 PM
Not going to claim to be a rail expert, but yes - I think there are similarities, also in terms of how competition drives an imperative to make your service more attractive
December 2, 2024 at 3:33 PM
Japan has one of the most fragmented rail networks in the OECD (including competing services operating from adjacent stations and running on parallel systems). It’s also widely considered one of the best rail systems in the world
December 2, 2024 at 1:34 PM