Wholesale prices swing wildly each hour of the day, and even more so as a larger share of electricity flows from wind and solar installations. Because the generation costs of wind or solar farms are negligible, market prices will be near zero when there is enough renewable power to cover most of a region’s electricity demand.

Electricity market dynamics get weirder when renewable-energy producers don’t have an incentive to stop feeding power into the grid, usually because of government subsidies. Then grids can be flooded with excess power, pushing prices into negative territory.

Van Diesen said he’s made 30 euros, equivalent to around $34, over the past five months charging his car, enough to cover the service fee from his power supplier, a Norwegian company called Tibber.

“I’m charging the car for free,” said van Diesen, who is part of a group of clean-energy enthusiasts in the Netherlands who call themselves green nerds. “To me it’s also like a hobby and a game—how far can I go?”

Doing laundry in the evening? The electricity could be free a few hours later when demand dies down and the wind picks up. Likewise, in regions with lots of solar power, charging an electric vehicle in the morning is usually far more expensive than powering up under the midday sun—or whenever the price is right.

In the U.S., most states don’t currently allow such real-time pricing, but many think that will change. Already, in some of the world’s biggest economies from Western Europe to California, the occurrence of zero and negative wholesale power prices is growing fast.

Most workers at this Dunbarton farm are refugees who have escaped harrowing wars and persecution. They come from the African nations of Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia and Congo, and they now run their own small businesses, selling their crops to local markets as well as to friends and connections in their ethnic communities. Farming provides them with both an income and a taste of home.

“I like it in the USA. I have my own job,” says Somali refugee and farmer Khadija Aliow as she hams it up by sashaying past a reporter, using one hand to steady the crate of crops on her head and the other to give a thumbs-up. “Happy. I’m so happy.”

Between 1980 and 2008 Britain returned to its position as one of Europe’s most successful large economies. For the most part, Tony Blair’s governments were able to sustain these advances. In 2005 Britain’s GDP per capita was just 2.8 percent behind Germany’s, in purchasing power parity terms, and fully 20 percent higher in US dollar terms, according to the World Bank. Penn World Tables, the other major source, have the UK overtaking Germany on GDP per capita in the mid-2000s.

Britain’s relative success during this period is clearest when compared to other major economies. The chart below shows GDP per capita in France, Germany, Italy and the UK as a percentage of US GDP per capita. It shows Britain, after decades of relative stagnation, beginning to converge on the United States and overtake the other European countries from the early 1980s. Britain’s change of fortunes under Thatcher, and continued improvement under Blair, is clear.

But crucial parts of the economy were still left unfixed – notably land-use planning policy, which Thatcher’s Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley had tried and failed to reform, and which Tony Blair’s government was unable to make a dent in either.

This left Britain with latent weaknesses that have become hugely problematic over the last quarter of a century. Since the 1990s, Britain has experienced rapid population growth, after decades of demographic stability, and big shifts in prosperity from some parts of the country to others. The decision to transition away from fossil fuels has created the need for huge quantities of new energy infrastructure, recently exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, but by no means beginning then. Across the developed world, great metropolitan agglomerations have become even more economically important. London has been among the biggest winners from this trend, in spite of the obstacles in its way.

What Britain needed in the last 25 years above all was a huge amount of building – of homes, energy supply, and transport infrastructure. Without it, Britain has fallen behind, weighed down by a development system that worked badly even in the 1950s and 60s, and that is positively disastrous today.