India Plans Air-Conditioning Temperature Standards to Save Power
India is working with appliance makers to standardize the cooling range of air conditioners to ensure that the minimum temperature is not set below 20C (68F), in an effort to cut the energy use of these power guzzlers.
The plan, although at an initial stage, reflects the government's focus to boost energy efficiency as electricity consumption soars. In recent years, demand has outpaced generation capacity, leaving parts of the country without power during sweltering summer months of April through June. Currently, thermostats on some of these devices can be adjusted to as low as 16C.
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Forbes
2 hours ago
- Forbes
Association Of Pickleball Professional Fires Next Salvo In Battle For International Expansion In The Sport
United States-base pickleball associations continue their quest to expand their influence abroad, in an ongoing battle amongst titans in the sport to tap into burgeoning markets for pickleball underneath the (more than reasonable) assumption that the sport will experience similar growth abroad that is has here domestically. The latest salvo in that battlefront has been launched. On June 11th, 2025 The Association of Pickleball Players (APP) announced a pair of agreements (one new, one the extension of an existing collaboration) that will help elevate the talent level in events abroad while also bringing the APP's marketing and logistics expertise into play for growing markets in the sport. The APP is announcing a new agreement with Global Sports Pickleball (GSP), the leading pickleball organization in India and extending their long-standing relationship with Pickleball England, the national governing body (NGB) of the sport in England and operators of the English Open. I caught up with the principals of each group to discuss their organizations and these new collaborations; Ken Herrmann (Founder of the APP), Shashank Khaitan (co-founder of Global Sports), and Karen Mitchell (Chairperson of Pickleball England) to talk about these deals and the future of international pickleball. The APP is entering its 4th year collaborating with Pickleball England on the English Open, and have for years been sending both its top touring Pros and its top NextGen stars across the pond to compete. Per Mitchell, the sending of the top US pros 'helps elevate the level of play in our events. People want to play where the pros play. This gives people added excitement of playing against that caliber of player. The APP also helps us with sponsorships, streaming of our event to APP-TV, and promotional help on social media.' The collaboration has helped make the English Open not only the largest current tournament in Europe, but the largest outside of the US (they're projecting to nearly 2,200 players at this year's event). The English Open is essentially the leading fund-raising event for Pickleball England (the UK equivalent of USA Pickleball), and allows the NGB to fund the operations of the rest of its goals. Says, Mitchell, "Our focus is grassroots. We've developed curriculum to create and train coaches, which we feel will develop more players. We're going into schools and universities. We're trying to reduce the average age of players. We want to be the Carlsberg of events. [side note: I did not at first understand the context of this comment about Carlsberg. Only after some pointed googling did I learn about Carlsberg Beer's advertising campaign where they claim to 'Probably be the Best beer in the world.' I may have to incorporate this English idiom into my day to day speech]. Pickleball England was more than happy to extend its relationship with the APP. Says Mitchell, 'I believe that the APP does such great work, both in the US and helping to expand pickleball's reach internationally. They do right by the players and they genuinely are interested in growing the game internationally.' The timing of announcing the two collaborations together is not without some history; as it turns out, Herrmann of the APP first met Shashank Khaitan of GSP at the English Open two years prior. GSP got its start three years ago, held its first major tournament in February of 2023, and now plays host to three marquee events each year: the Monsoon Championships (held in August), the Indian Open (held in February), and the Global Sports Pro league, which debuted in February this year and featured 100 pro players from all over the globe participating for a total prize purse of $550k. (Note: if you're reading this and you're wondering which of the multiple India-based organizations GSP is, I suggest reading The Dink's Eric Tice's excellent comprehensive January 2025 overview of all things Pickleball in that region of the world. It provides an overview of GSP and its evolution of partnerships with other orgs in the region, some of which are now defunct). Khaitan describes the beginnings of the APP collaboration, which has been two years in the making, 'We first met at the English Open. We saw APP Next Gen players competing and were really impressed. We started a relationship with some of the APP pros there and became very close with Rob Nunnery in particular. This led to Nunnery and his partner Andrei Daescu traveling to play in the 2024 Indian Open." Nunnery and Daescu won the doubles title in that event, and in the final they played Armaan Bhatia & Harsh Mehta, who stretched them to three games before falling. This of course is the same Bhatia who has now come to the US and medaled in both the US Open and the APP's NYC Open in May 2025. This turned out to be a seminal match in Indian pickleball, as (in Khaitan's words), 'it showed Indian players where they needed to go, and when Bhatia & Mehta played the American pros in the final, they realized they really could compete against the best.' The most immediate and apparent impact of the APP-GSP collaboration will be the cross-pollination of US-based APP pros in GSP-run events going forward, and vice versa. The top 12 APP Male and Female pros will be offered seeded slots at the forthcoming 2025 Monsoon Open, and will be entered into the league auction for the 2026 iteration of the GSP League. Conversely, GSP will work with the APP to provide more opportunities for both established Asian pros and up-and-coming Indian & Asian players at the APP's Fort Lauderdale training facilities and academies. Both organizations clearly have respect for one another, and they both share some of the same values when it comes to growing the game. Says Herrmann, 'GSP has proven themselves as the premier leading organization in India, and as the APP continues to grow internationally it's always been my goal to keep my inner circle credible and full of quality people.' Khaitan agrees, 'We believe our ideology with APP is similar; we don't want to lock players down and want to give players growth experience opportunities.' Herrmann mentioned that the APP is now working on the development of international camps, both at the Fort in December and potentially at Mumbai-based events in 2026. Perhaps the most interesting takeaway from my conversations with Khaitan and Herrmann were the statements of their collective visions of international pickleball. One of Herrmann's longer term goals with partnerships like these is the pursuit of a global ranking system. He says, 'I want and foresee results in India to count towards APP rankings. If the No. 1 player from India comes here and there's a question where to seed him or her, there's a proven record of results for that player in international events, whether they're in India or in England or wherever.' Khaitan is more expansive. 'We want to set a common goal, see how to build towards it. We want to build something global. Tennis and the ATP really shifted when they globalized and held events all around the world, and we feel the same thing will happen with pickleball.' One thing is for certain; every year that US-based pros extend their presence in major international tournaments and leagues is a year where we get close to these goals. We've already seen a top player from India come to the US and succeed at the pro level, and it's just a matter of time before that becomes a regular occurrence.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
The charts that show why Reeves's spending plans are a fantasy
Rachel Reeves claims she is investing in the country's Chancellor was cheered on by her front benches as she announced more money for the NHS, defence and schools in a move she boasted would lead to 'a national renewal'. In some senses, there were few surprises on Wednesday. We already knew how much Reeves had to dole out in her maiden spending review. The NHS gobbled up most of the money, with day-to-day spending on the Department of Health and Social Care growing by an average of 2.8pc a year over the forecast period. Defence spending has also received a significant boost as pressure from Nato mounts. Other departments, notably the Home Office, were squeezed as Reeves sought to make the sums add up. But while the numbers may tally on paper, economists are already questioning whether they will work in reality as pressures build from a more dangerous world and an older population. There are also fears that Reeves's announcement will pave the way for massive increases in council tax to keep Britain's streets safe. Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), says that while health and defence are big winners 'in pounds and pence, even here, one has to wonder whether this will be enough'. There are other pressures elsewhere. The Chancellor once vowed to never make an unfunded spending commitment but this week announced she will restore winter fuel payments to most pensioners with no clues as to how it will be paid for. She has also announced a Fair Pay Agreement for social care, which will set minimum terms across the sector without any clarity on how the proposals will be funded. Welfare spending, which sits outside Whitehall budgets, is poised to keep ballooning over the next five years as the Government prepares another about-turn to planned cuts to disability benefits. And unresolved questions over levies such as fuel duty will also pile more pressure on the Chancellor. While Reeves's statement is meant to set in stone government spending plans for at least the next three years, her £40bn tax raid last year may not be enough to foot the eventual bill. The tax burden is already on course to reach a peacetime high, but JP Morgan and Capital Economics both believe that Reeves will have to raise taxes by more than £20bn in the Budget this autumn to cover her increased spending plans and fend off increasing pressure from Reform. 'The spending review contains few surprises,' says Elliott Jordan-Doak, at Pantheon Macroeconomics. 'The question is only how big tax hikes will be in October.' The Government hinted on Wednesday that council tax would rise sharply to pay for policing after Reeves cut the Home Office budget by 2.2pc. Reeves claimed 'police spending power' would increase by 2.3pc in the coming years, which documents suggest could include more money from council tax. The Liberal Democrats said families in typical Band D households now faced a £395 increase in council tax by the next election. While the NHS is clearly a winner, there are already questions over whether the money will be enough to keep the health service running. Analysis by the IFS shows there have been just two occasions – in 1991 and 2004 – where health spending grew more slowly than envisaged in the spending review. More often, governments have been forced to top up health budgets to boost day-to-day health spending, which is on course to rise from a 26pc share of Whitehall budgets in 1999 to more than 40pc by the end of the decade. Reeves has set out plans to increase the NHS day-to-day budget more slowly than its historical average – by 3pc in real terms compared to 3.6pc – despite growing pressures on the health service. The plan set out by the previous Conservative government assumed real-terms funding increases of around 3.6pc per year. Johnson says: 'Aiming to get back to meeting the NHS 18 week target for hospital waiting times within this parliament is enormously ambitious – an NHS funding settlement below the long-run average might not measure up.' The plans also revealed the front-loaded nature of many of the settlements, with NHS capital spending set to remain flat in real terms for the rest of the decade after this year. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the Government's tax and spending watchdog, believes pressures from an older and sicker population will increase demand for NHS services by 1.1pc per year alone. 'The pressure to spend more on the NHS will still be great even after today's announcement,' says Jordan-Doak. Economists also questioned whether the health department's pledge to find £9bn in efficiency savings by the end of the decade was credible. Labour will unveil a refreshed NHS 10-year plan in the coming months, which is expected to demand more spending on staff and equipment to deal with Britain's demographic challenge. Another winner from Wednesday's spending review was defence, with spending in this area on track to rise to 2.6pc of GDP by 2027. But there was no mention of a 3pc target which Sir Keir Starmer has committed to, let alone the 3.5pc goal Nato is piling pressure on countries to reach. Increasing defence spending from 2.5pc of GDP to 3pc represents an increase of £17bn by the end of the decade. That's the equivalent of an extra 2p on income tax. Johnson says: 'On defence, it's entirely possible that an increase in the Nato spending target will mean that maintaining defence spending at 2.6pc of GDP no longer cuts the mustard.' There are also doubts about whether Reeves will be able to force through the cuts envisioned for the departments that lost out in Wednesday's announcement – including the Home Office, transport, Foreign Office and environment departments, which will suffer cuts in real terms. Even schools will get a real-terms freeze if you strip out the cost of expanding free school meals. In fact, departmental spending to 2028 will on average grow more slowly than under plans Rishi Sunak set out in the Conservatives' last spending review in 2021. 'We think that these real-terms spending cuts will be impossible to deliver given the pressure on public services and voters' demands for increased spending,' says Jordan-Doak. Then there are the Chancellor's investment plans. Capital spending is set to rise by £113bn over this parliament, with money going on everything from transport to green energy, new prisons and housing. Reeves is gambling that this investment blitz can kick-start growth. But as with any gamble, there is a risk it could go wrong. 'If the Government insists on accumulating the extra spending it's planning over the full parliament, it seems only fair to also draw attention to the £140bn of extra borrowing we're forecast to do over the same period,' says Johnson, at the IFS. Extra borrowing will keep Britain's debt pile rising every year until the end of the decade. 'That borrowing incurs a cost in the form of additional debt interest – and one that's bigger than it was a year ago,' says Johnson. The question was always whether the extra investment would bring sufficient benefits to make that worthwhile.' Government borrowing costs rose in the immediate aftermath of Reeves's announcement. Andrew Goodwin, at Oxford Economics, calculates that the Chancellor's already wafer-thin £9.9bn headroom to meet her borrowing rules has already been eroded by £2.5bn as a result of higher gilt yields. And while Reeves boasts about all the extra investment being pumped into the economy, another key question is: will she be able to get all of that money out the door? Previous analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows that successive governments of all stripes have struggled to spend all the money they wanted. Just £1 in every £6 in planned investment spending over the past seven spending reviews since 1998 actually went out the door. Why? Governments are often too optimistic about when projects become shovel-ready. There may be planning hold-ups, and the construction sector may not be able to cope with all that extra demand for engineers, project managers and construction workers to deliver these projects. 'We now know more about what sorts of projects the Government plans to invest in,' Johnson says. 'The focus must now shift to delivery and avoiding the all-too-common project over-runs.' Governments have in the past raided capital budgets in order to make their day-to-day spending budgets add up. New safeguards have been introduced to in theory prevent this from happening again. But this may simply make it harder for Labour to meet spending demands if plans go awry without putting up tax. Ben Ramanauskas, at Policy Exchange, casts doubt on Labour's ability to live within its means. He says: 'While the uplift to the defence and criminal justice budgets are welcome, this is unlikely to go far enough. Instead the Chancellor has chosen to prioritise the NHS by giving it even more money, without insisting on productivity improvements.' All this is expected to keep the size of the state permanently bigger than its pre-lockdown size. Ramanauskas says: 'The Government is yet to set out how it will fund its largesse to the public sector. However, it will almost certainly have to place even greater strain on the public finances by increasing borrowing or adding extra burdens to households and businesses by raising taxes.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Fact check: 2025 spending review claims
On Wednesday Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered the Labour Government's first spending review, outlining its spending plans for the next few years. We've taken a look at some of the key claims. How much is spending increasing by? At the start of her speech Ms Reeves announced that 'total departmental budgets will grow by 2.3% a year in real terms'. That headline figure doesn't tell the full story, however. Firstly, 2.3% is the average annual real-terms growth in total departmental budgets between 2023/24 and 2028/29. That means it includes spending changes that have already been implemented, for both the current (2025/26) and previous (2024/25) financial years. The average annual increase between this year and 2028/29 is 1.5%. Therefore, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said, 'most departments will have larger real-terms budgets at the end of the Parliament than the beginning, but in many cases much of that extra cash will have arrived by April'. Secondly, it's worth noting that the 2.3% figure includes both day-to-day (Resource DEL) and investment (Capital DEL) spending. Capital spending (which funds things like infrastructure projects) is increasing by 3.6% a year on average in real terms between 2023/24 and 2029/30, and by 1.8% between 2025/26 and 2029/30. Day-to-day departmental budgets meanwhile are seeing a smaller average annual real-terms increase – of 1.7% between 2023/24 and 2028/29 and 1.2% between 2025/26 and 2028/29. Which departments are the winners and losers? Ms Reeves touted substantial spending increases in some areas (for example, the 3% rise in day-to-day NHS spending in England), but unsurprisingly her statement did not focus on areas where spending will decrease. Changes to Government spending are not uniform across all departments, and alongside increases in spending on things like the NHS, defence and the justice system, a number of Government departments will see their budgets decrease in real terms. Departments facing real-terms reductions in overall and day-to-day spending include the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (this factors in reductions in aid spending announced earlier this year to offset increased defence spending), the Home Office (although the Government says the Home Office's budget grows in real terms if a planned reduction in asylum spending is excluded) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Did the Conservatives leave a '£22 billion black hole'? Ms Reeves made a claim we've heard a number of times since it first surfaced in July 2024 – that the previous Conservative government left a '£22 billion black hole in the public finances'. That figure comes from a Treasury audit that forecast a £22 billion overspend in departmental day-to-day spending in 2024/25, but the extent to which it was unexpected or inherited is disputed. The IFS said last year that some of the pressures the Government claimed contributed to this so-called 'black hole' could have been anticipated, but others did 'indeed seem to be greater than could be discerned from the outside'. An Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) review of its March 2024 forecast found an estimated £9.5 billion of additional spending pressures were known to the Treasury at that point in time, but were not known to the OBR as it prepared its forecast. It's true that this review didn't confirm the £22 billion figure, but it also did not necessarily prove that it was incorrect, because Labour's figure included pressures which were identified after the OBR prepared its forecast and so were beyond the scope of the OBR's review. We've written more about how the Government reached the figure of £22 billion in our explainer on this topic. How big is the increase in NHS appointments? Ms Reeves took the opportunity to congratulate Health Secretary Wes Streeting for delivering 'three-and-a-half million extra' hospital appointments in England. The Government has previously celebrated this as a 'massive increase', particularly in light of its manifesto pledge to deliver an extra two million appointments a year. Ms Reeves' claim was broadly accurate – data published last month shows there were 3.6 million additional appointments between July 2024 and February 2025 compared to the previous year. But importantly that increase is actually smaller than the 4.2 million rise that happened in the equivalent period the year before, under the Conservative government – as data obtained by Full Fact under the Freedom of Information Act and published last month revealed. What do announcements on asylum hotels, policing, nurseries and more mean for the Government's pledges? Ms Reeves made a number of announcements that appear to directly impact the delivery of several pre-existing Labour pledges, many of which we're already monitoring in our Government Tracker. (We'll be updating the tracker to reflect these announcements in due course, and reviewing how we rate progress on pledges as necessary). The Chancellor announced an average increase in 'police spending power' of 2.3% a year in real terms over the course of the review period, which she said was the equivalent of an additional £2 billion. However, as police budgets comprise a mix of central Government funding and local council tax receipts, some of this extra spending is expected to be funded by increases in council tax precepts. Ms Reeves said this funding would help the Government achieve its commitment of 'putting 13,000 additional police officers, PCSOs and special constables into neighbourhood policing roles in England and Wales', a pledge we're monitoring here. The spending review also includes funding of 'almost £370 million across the next four years to support the Government's commitment to deliver school-based nurseries across England', which Ms Reeves said would help the Government deliver its pledge to have 'a record number of children being school-ready'. The Chancellor also committed to ending the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by the end of this Parliament, with an additional £200 million announced to 'accelerate the transformation of the asylum system'. When we looked last month at progress on the Government's pledge to 'end asylum hotels' we said it appeared off track, as figures showed the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels was higher at the end of March 2025 than it was when Labour came into Government.
