I'm on a electricity tariff where the per kWh unit price changes every 30 minutes, you're basically being charged at market rate or thereabouts, the prices for the next 28 hours are announced at 4pm every day.
Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately.
On really windy days you definitely get to see the benefit where prices drop to zero or even negative, which is great if you have an EV or something to dump lots of power into. Looking at todays prices they're like 1-3p p/kWh!
But that doesn't last, as the wind dies things start to get back to normal.
The key with the tariff though is to just play the averages and generally avoid high power usage during the peak periods. My average for the last 2 years was around 30% cheaper (p/year) than what I would have paid if I was on a normal energy tariff.
It will be interesting to see whether that trend continues, especially with the state the world has suddenly been thrown into.
I wonder if we'll start to see gimmicks in home appliances for taking advantage of variable prices.
Like for EV charging I assume it's a basic requirement, you simply wouldn't buy a car that didn't let you adjust the charging schedule based on cost.
But what about... Freezers? Maybe there are scenarios where your freezer could drop 20° below its usual temp while prices are low, and thereby avoid running the compressor for several hours while prices are high.
What about a tumble dryer button that says "these clothes are fine to stay wet for up to 8 hours, dry them at the cheapest moment during that window"?
TBH I doubt these things would really pay for themselves but as a consumer I'd still be tempted by the "lol, neat" factor.
Also I assume the local-LLM heads are already finding ways to have their agents do useful work while the GPU can churn tokens for almost-free.
Also makes me think of fun Home Assistant workflows. Like, "when energy is expensive, just try to keep the house between 16-26°. When energy approaches free, I want to live at exactly 20°". (I assume heat pumps also have ways to take advantage of this in more roundabout ways).
I think freezers would definitely be a gimmick as they don't really use that much power.
I can see it being a nice feature for higher-load tasks though, e.g. my dishwasher uses about 1.8kWh for a cycle. On this tariff it's trivial to compute the best start-end time based on the 30 minute price windows, so if the dishwasher could do that it would be pretty sweet. Right now my dishwasher just supports a 3h delay function. I wouldn't mind if my dishwasher had a (local) API you could hit to control its schedule. Sadly this usually comes with some cloud requirement though.
Our Mitsubishi heat pump water heater has integration with some solar systems and weather services to attempt to time hot water production to solar peak.
We don't have solar panels but have a solar energy plan (cheap during the day, expensive during dawn/sundown, average overnight with fixed hourly schedule independent of actual production) so for us it's just programmed to follow a fixed schedule of prioritizing filling up during the solar hours and 100% forbidden from filling up during the expensive "duck curve" hours.
Things like freezers don't take a huge amount of power. It's definitely about things that do space heating/cooling. The traditional approach is to put your electric water heater on a timer. That way you can schedule your hot water use on a consistent schedule but only heat the water at night when you can be sure the rates are lower.
In my case I've got a contactor on the house power board that disconnects the hot water at night, so it's only heating off solar power. You can also get specialised solar diverters that do the same thing, but they cost literally ten times as much and only squeeze a tiny bit of extra efficiency out of the system.
If you do go down this path, make sure you insulate the crap out of the cylinder and surrounding water pipes, mine only heats once a day and that's once the sun's providing the power for it.
You can basically do that today if you wanted to by buying consumer grade batteries and smart switches. A whole house battery would be better, but it's more expensive to install.
For the tumble drier and dishwasher, those usually come with time delay features. That's usually good enough if your goal is to timeshift a load.
I have a battery for my fridge not for this purpose, but because I'd rather not have a power outage spoil my food.
With "smart" appliances that can be controlled, there's often a community integration to HomeAssistant ... and then there's the free EMHASS addon which will optimise for profit, or self consumption based on energy prices (both incoming and outgoing) as well as any on-site generation (e.g. Solar PV) batteries etc. etc.
Yeah, but that’s strictly worse for some of these examples. You can’t overcome the loss of energy just going into the battery and getting it back and the there is the huge cost of the battery itself.
The freezer example would require like $10 of electronics assuming there isn’t already a WiFi chip in it.
Many homes in Norway has this. Its a smart plug in your fuse box. For me it offsets EV charging untill the electricity is at its cheapest, it also cuts down on heating for the peak hours etc etc.
That's a great system. Like so many things, success comes down to implementation.
In California, for example, PG&E will charge you the maximum peak demand prices while simultaneously paying other states to take electricity during the solar duck curve.
I have an EV and am on a Time of Use rate plane here in SF. My lowest rates are between 12am and 3pm every day. I charge the car and run everything I can in terms of major appliance use between these hours (dishwasher scheduled to start at midnight or manually run early in the day, washer/dryer loads run in the morning). I am home during the day which makes this easier to do though. Another solution of course would be to bank your solar generation or low rate electricity into a set of batteries that you could draw from during peak times.
I'm on a similar tariff in the UK and just had a 10kwh battery installed which is just amazing for shaving off all the load between 4-7pm. Whole system installed was ~6k GBP and I think my payback time is going to be < 5 years which I'm super pleased with.
I would also like to know the company name please.
Would love to get a Forster battery + invertor system installed. Seems like the battery is £2k for 16kWh and maybe £1k for an inverter? so interested in your cost breakdown.
How are the fixed costs in this? Here in Sweden I have seen a strong trend that as the grid has become more variable and connected to the European grid, a larger portion of the bill becomes fixed. For most part of the year, the fixed costs are now greater than costs that scale with consumption.
Transmission and construction, crewing and maintenance of of thermal power plants (under the name of "reserve energy") cost a lot of money, which in turn becomes fixed grid costs. On top of that you got consumption costs during periods of poor weather, which in combination of high fossil fuel costs means that the consumption prices spikes. The cost of energy during optimal weather conditions is in contrast so low that at this point they can basically just be rounded down to zero.
"Some of the modelling we have suggests that you could get to a position by 2030 where if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be the same as where they are today because of the increase in non-commodity costs."
Fixed costs are enormous and are increasingly driven by paying for the CFDs that back up the economics of wind. The CFD scheme allows wind producers to de-risk from market prices by locking in a fixed price with the government who then recover this from bills.
So, yes you get to enjoy low variable costs when it's windy, but you pay for the priviledge year round.
I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy.
Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.
> I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy.
Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.
The CfDs set a floor price when there’s lots electricity being generated by renewables but they also contribute to bills when the market price is over the strike price
Electricity bills are higher because we’ve had two fossils fuel shocks in the last 5 years and the costs for decarbonisation are added to electricity bills rather than gas ones
My friend has a car which can charge only when prices are low. I'm not totally sure how it works though, does the smart meter communicate this to the car?
Some chargers communicate directly with the energy supplier and charge at the cheaper rates.
You can do this yourself as well with home assistant (if your charger supports it) and some API calls. It's just a matter of telling the charger when to start and stop the charge. The rest of the communication between the charger and the car is some protocol I can't remember the name of.
Could be wrong but I guess it more likely communicates with the charger. The car will always try to draw if it's plugged in, but most chargers can be switched on ("charge") and off ("don't charge") remotely. It's probably quite trivial to have something watch the price of power and on/off as appropriate
Explained above, I WFH, single (no kids) and have an EV - but I don't use the car for commute etc so I can be choosy about when I charge the car and take advantage of the ultra cheap periods.
Fixed price advantage is you use power whenever you want. Your average unit rate is just the price on the tariff. Predictable and safe.
Agile price changes every 30 minutes, so you need to do a little planning. But if you take advantage of the cheap periods you'll generally come out on top. My average unit rate last year was like 16.5p p/kWh whereas the standard tariff was 23-24p, so some nice savings. There's also some risk involved - the price can go up to £1 p/kWh and a few days in winter in 2024 it did that for a short while (around the peak periods) so you have to take on that risk - and obviously being exposed to the world energy markets does mean you get exposure to stuff like wars impacting global markets.
I mean there's nothing stopping you from using lots of power between 4pm-7pm it's just you'll drag that average unit rate up to the point where it's probably not worth it. When I say "use lots of power" I don't mean like I sit in the dark between 4-7pm, it's just I avoid the big ticket power users like ovens, showers, cookers etc
Yeah, and the really important point is that you get to see the prices a day ahead, which is what makes it actually pretty easy to live with.
For instance, if I know it's going to be expensive when I'd be cooking tomorrow's evening meal, then I won't make something that would need a long time in the oven. And if it's going to be particularly cheap around lunchtime, then I'll plan to do a big load of laundry then.
I have electric heating, which I thought might be a cause of anxiety but it's not really worked out that way. The temperature in my flat won't go down by more than a degree or two with the heating off over the course of the sort of 4 hour price spikes you tend to see in mid-January. If it looks like it's going to be unusually bad, I could always raise the temp by half a degree beforehand, but in reality I've only bothered to do that maybe three times in the past couple of years.
Basically, it's just another thing to factor in when planning my day. No more of a hassle than checking the weather forecast or glancing at my calendar.
> Basically, it's just another thing to factor in when planning my day. No more of a hassle than checking the weather forecast or glancing at my calendar.
Sounds like an incredible hassle at a level I would pay hundreds of dollars per month to avoid. That sort of mental overhead is crazy to me. But I'm also someone who finds having a single event on my calendar for the day disrupts my productivity and mental peace to an absurd level.
Time of day billing is definitely the future for renewables though, once they hit a saturation point for the grid it's the only thing that makes any sort of sense. Perhaps residential is the last place it needs to happen, but eventually it will be the norm. I see it working more in an automated fashion though. Smart load centers (panels), smart appliances, etc. that are connected to the local power company's API. Then you set some rules around it.
Stuff like cooking dinner though? I cannot imagine planning my day around saving a couple bucks. That's just insane to me. Energy use and all this mechanization/automation/technology exists to make life more convenient in the first place! Stuff like EV charging, raising/lowering temps in anticipation of power pricing, laundry (dryer) scheduling, etc. seems to be where 80% of the wins can be made, and are all much more automatable to avoid having to think about it. That last 20% can simply be taken up by whole-home battery storage, which by the time any of this happens at scale will be pretty much the norm.
The thing that concerns me most though are regional "seasonal" events where a once-a-decade lul in energy production happens and there is simply not enough dispatchable power on the grid to meet demand due to everyone hyper-optimizing their loads in such a fashion.
I've been on the tariff for 2 years now, at first I was looking at the prices every day, but over time you get used to how it works and the price watching starts to tail off. The rule of thumb is just to avoid high load stuff during the peak window (load shift) - sticking to those principles you generally come out of on top. Playing the averages is the key.
Nowadays I don't really look at the prices that much other than when it's windy as I might be tempted to charge the car.
That being said though, if current world events continue and the energy situation degrades further - causing my average unit rate to start creeping up, I might consider getting a home battery , solar etc to compensate, or leave the tariff entirely.
Yeah, it's definitely a bit of a game for me, and my electricity bill was already low enough that the savings are trivial.
But I'm the sort of person who enjoys being flexible when planning my day. I'll fit chores such as laundry around work meetings. Decide whether to go for a lunchtime run (and thus have an extra shower) based on the weather and having an a big enough gap in my day. Buy ingredients for dinner based on the weather and how I'm feeling. Expected energy cost is just another factor in the mix - and one that only rarely becomes decisive.
The closest the UK grid has ever come to not being able to cover demand was a few years ago when most of our nuclear fleet went offline at the same time in the middle of a January cold snap due to the discovery of a potential maintenance problem in the steam plant. If there were to be a repeat of that scenario, then the spread of domestic dynamic pricing would actually help matters by driving load shifting behaviour.
A decade back, in the US, the local power company would give you a discount if you used less energy than average during peak hours. At the time I had a vacant rental, very little energy use. (FWIW I’ve since sold it, being a landlord isn’t a good time)
I watched a specific neighbor go through great pains to honor this system and so as to reap the benefits of a much lower bill. Sweating their buns off during the hottest part of the day, open windows, no tv on, etc. fully committed.
They saved 8 dollars that month. My vacant rental, not doing a goddamn thing, saved 6 dollars.
If your system is similar, you’re optimizing your life around the cost of a monthly Netflix subscription, at best.
There is an element of truth in that if you go to the extremes, where it's almost definitely not worth it.
I don't sit in the dark during the peak times, during the week I'm working during that time anyway and I still have my monitors etc on. It's just I don't usage high-draw appliances like cookers during that time. I eat dinner after 7pm anyway.
Also I have an EV, but don't commute or travel long distances regularly, so I charge my car when opportunity strikes, especially when the prices go negative - this means I don't really spend that much on fuel really. The savings really start to come in if you have "bursty" high energy stuff that can take advantage of the cheapest periods like an EV or home battery. If you just have "baseload" stuff that runs all day like A/C or whatever then yeah you won't really see any significant savings.
Not GP but I assume the fixed prices have to be fairly high to account for people using lots of power during peak demand when most people use lots of power?
For me I'm happy to avoid big power draws during the peak times, as I'm 'compensated' for it outside of those periods with a little planning. Downside is when the wind is not blowing AND disruptions to global energy markets - I'm exposed to that, warts and all, there's definitely been an increase in prices over the past 4 weeks, although there has been a few days (including today) where the wind has basically made the energy free and my average unit rate is dropping again.
It's not only that, you also need reserve for the intermittent sources like wind and solar.
I live on an island, we have big batteries that can supply up to 15 MW of power for a period. In the Netherlands we have natural gas plants that are called up when the wind or sun output decreases, lest the grid frequency drop.
....that being said, when you see stuff like this page and news articles about cheap renewable power etc, there are A LOT of negative reactions to it (even evidenced by the comments on here!) because for most people in the UK they never really see any direct benefit - energy prices seem to keep going up and a lot of people are on contracts with fixed rates that rise often.
I'm not sure what the solution is, I know that the price of electricty is dictated by gas so maybe decoupling that will help - but that probably has complications with balancing the grid.
The tariff I'm on (Octopus Agile) suits me as I WFH, have an EV and it's just me living in the house, I can move my usage outside of hte peak periods quite easily and I built a website to help me find the cheapest charging periods for my car based on the prices for the next day. The other day my average unit rate was like 2p per/kWh and I dumped like 30kWh into my car lol
Yes - the wholesale price of electricity can sometimes be very low (or negative), particularly when there is a lot of wind. And some tariffs pass that on to consumers. But I don't see how it works at scale.
This is because the wind farms don't get paid the wholesale price. They get paid their guaranteed, index-linked CFD strike price. This means that, for every £1/MWh drop in the wholesale price, they get an exactly matching extra £1/MWh to top them back up to their strike price. They can bid a low price into the market safe in the knowledge they'll get paid their CFD price.
And that top-up has to be paid by somebody: either other bill payers, or the taxpayer.
That wouldn't be so bad if the strike prices were low. But they're not. The recent "Allocation Rounds" guaranteed offshore wind farms in excess of GBP100/MWh, index linked for at least 15 years.
To put it in context, these numbers are higher than the wholesale gas price - even with an uplift for carbon externalities - for all but the worst period of the Ukraine invasion a few years back.
But it gets worse: on top of these extremely high fixed prices for wind, we also have to pay for the installation of tens of billions of pounds (if not more) of new grid connections, because the wind farms are nowhere near the centres of demand. This cost is also added to bills.
It doesn't end there. Readers may be aware that the wind doesn't always blow. Which means we need something that's able to spin up or down on demand. In the UK, that means gas. So we have the ridiculous situation of having to pay the gas plants to sit around doing nothing, just so we can call on them at minimal notice when needed. And remember: there can be long periods with basically zero wind or solar (the famous 'dunkelflaute' phenomenon in winter).
This means we need non-wind capacity pretty much equal to peak winter demand, in order to be safe during the week or so some years when there's no wind.
So we're paying to build and maintain TWO generation systems in parallel.
This is why electricity costs in the UK are on an ever-upwards trajectory: all these 'policy costs' are added to the wholesale price, and are a large and growing component of the _retail_ price that most consumers pay.
Depressingly, 'storage' doesn't fix this. Indeed, it's a fun exercise to calculate how much electrical energy is consumed in the peak of winter in the UK over a one- or two-week period and then figure out how much the necessary battery capacity would cost... or, even more fun, how many Welsh and Scottish valleys we'd need to flood to create the pumped-storage capacity. We're talking tens of trillions of pounds.
I fear the UK has, with the best of intentions, made a mistake of generation-defining proportions with its bet on wind :(
In other words, betting on wind (or sun) where there is little wind (and sun) is not an optimal choice. But folks on HN were telling otherwise. Who might’ve known…
It's a good question. To be honest, I'm still trying to get my head around how the UK electricity market works. Its complexity is definitely a big part of why so many reasonable people can end up disagreeing so vehemently... vanishingly few people understand how the whole thing works (and pretty much none of those who do are listened to by the politicians...)
Your question is good for another reason: you say "price" without qualifying whether you mean wholesale or retail (and, if retail, what individual households pay or what is experienced by industry). A lot of commentators and politicians routinely conflate the concepts to serve their own agendas in order to confuse non-experts.
If one looks first at the wholesale price, you're right that - in general - one would expect it to 'spike' when the gas prices shoot up. But on days when wind is dominant this has a minimal effect on retail prices, because the extra money paid to the wind farms (everybody gets the clearing price) is exactly offset by a reduction in the CfD payment. To repeat: consumers pay the same (high) price for most wind-generated electricity irrespective of the gas price.
So the interesting question, I think, is: what happens on days when the wind isn't blowing and gas generation is dominant? And here's the thing: if the price for gas-generated electricity (with carbon tax to account for the climate externality) is below the CfD strike prices, we're still ahead, even if it has spiked above its average. And because the CfD strike prices are so eye-wateringly high, this happens far more often than not.
Indeed, it was only for part of 2022 that the wholesale price was above the CfD prices and so the wind farms were paying money in to the system rather than taking out.
The key is factories ideally are mobile. Follow the winds. Come online and go offline when the wind blows. Use as much free energy as possible to hit yearly production targets and then take the rest of the year off.
The price for wholesale electricity is set by a bidding process, with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce a unit of electricity.
Once built, the cost of generating power from renewables is very low, so these typically come in with the cheapest bid. Nuclear might come next.
Gas generators often have the highest costs, because they have to buy gas to burn, as well as paying a "carbon price" - a charge for emissions.
The wholesale cost is set by the last unit of electricity needed to meet demand from consumers. This means that even if gas only generates 1% of power at a given time, gas will still set the wholesale price.
Gas in the UK is expensive because the Tories spent decades selling off the storage so developers could turn them into real estate. This continued well into the 2000's when, for example the lettuce (Truss) closed the Rough storage facility in 2017.
Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation. Another one of the Tory's great ideas. The UK privitisation model is designed to generate profit. Norway made a different choice. Equinor is majority state-owned, and Norwegian extraction operates within a framework designed to capture resource rents for public benefit. Britain privatised its way out of that option decades ago in the Thatcher-era and has never seriously revisited it.
Analysis from the University of Oxford[1] found that maximising oil and gas extraction from the North Sea would only save households £16 to £82 per year – and this would rely on tax revenues collected being distributed to households to offset their energy bills.
Dr Anupam Sen, co-author of the analysis, said the idea that “draining” the North Sea would make the UK more energy secure and significantly cut household bills is “sheer fantasy”. “We show that regardless of the remaining lifetime of North Sea oil and gas, a ‘drill baby drill’ approach to extraction would actually cost households more money versus continuing on our path to clean energy.”
The authors stress that savings gained from the clean energy transition are recurring annual reductions in bills which would continue indefinitely, whereas North Sea oil and gas are finite resources that would run out around 2040.
Exactly, and the Tories banned onshore wind, and refused to really invest in offshore wind. We've got the North Sea and its perfect for wind farms we should have had for decades
They didn't refuse to invest in offshore wind. Tories were the ones who started this ball rolling in the mid-2010s by breaknecking the removal of non-renewable energy production without any clear plan.
The issue with offshore wind is that it isn't always windy. If you look at modelling with energy system with a high proportion of offshore wind, you need other sources of energy which often isn't factored into the economic return of the original investment.
We are doing this because, for some reason, we have decided there is political capital in paying out these huge subsidies to large companies to produce expensive energy. I would think that would be obvious when the UK has extremely high electricity prices and renewable production is very high...where do you think the money is going? It is going to subsidise inefficient and expensive supply.
Also, one of the primary issues with the UK is that the political system heavily incentivizes people to blame "the other side" for these issues. The Tories were extremely aggressive in moving towards green energy but people who vote for Labour, because they support green energy, will have to believe the opposite. There are other posts on this chain that also blame the Tories for things that didn't happen. In this system, it is very hard for anything good to happen and is how you end up with someone like Starmer who appears to have almost no opinions on anything other than staying in power and keeping the gravy train going for the lads. Not serious. Expect things to get significantly worse.
Our electricity prices are much higher than anywhere else. I remember reading research last year that the cost of government intervention in so high that if gas prices tapered to zero, electricity prices would not fall. It is going to get much, much, much worse.
Labour and the Conservatives are no different from each other. The Tories back then expected the "free market" to take care of everything. And that "free market" has clearly failed British people given where we are. They were "extremely aggressive" in their words (like BoJo back in 2020) but really extremely passive in their actions. Britain really needs grid-scale energy storage to make renewables work and that is its own big challenge.
This is currently called natural gas. You store it in the ground, and in "day tanks" on land connected to pipes.
Nuclear can also be seen in the same way in relation to renewables.
Batteries are currently much further than I ever thought possible, but still nowhere close to being cost effective enough for most areas.
If you forced every solar or wind installation to have at least 48 hours of nameplate capacity in storage, you would get closer to the true cost of deploying renewables. Right now there is a whole lot of cherry picking going on, where investors are taking the profitable easy stuff, collecting subsidies, and then making the hard expensive stuff someone else's problem.
Right now battery deployments cover the few hour duck curve at best, because that's the only profitable way to deploy them. Hopefully the trend continues though!
Come on bro...next election, it will be different this time.
Tories do not back the free market. You said it yourself, the two parties are the same. Elections are irrelevant, both political parties pander towards orthogonal groups of voters, they tell them they are different, and they get in government and will do the same thing. Reform will do the same thing.
Also, the characterisation of what the government is able to do is extremely inconsistent. Able to lock down the whole country by fiat? Happened in an afternoon. Able to approve a 2-bed house twenty miles away from anyone? Sorry mate, need 26 forms, planning authority, need solar panels, need heat pump, etc. One of the big issues the UK has is with the understanding of government, it is the most bizarre mix of extreme libertarianism and extreme authoritarianism. It is a country where police will arrest someone from criticising a politician or the police AND a country where the police are unable to investigate almost all crimes (fraud investigations are outsourced to banks and private companies but there is action at multiple layers of government to control what happens on Twitter).
Storage is not possible. Everyone knows this. What game is being played here? Which other medium-sized country has large amounts of renewables with as much storage as we require. Electricity prices are already ruinously expensive. The solution is simple: do the stuff that works, that is it. The UK is a tale in being unable to do simple things that work.
Interestingly, the reality is that the "free market" is making this happen and its already here. 'The UK grid-scale battery storage market grew 45% by operational capacity in 2025, with 4GWh coming online during the year, bringing total operational capacity to 12.9GWh.'
Congrats you have storage for about twenty minutes of national consumption. Rough had 9 days and was basically just a hole in the ground in the sea, rather than the manically expensive battery storage which involve massive levels of corruption and legal battles to get started. Genius.
Again, this is the issue. People suggesting that stuff that makes no obviously no sense for political or social reasons. Why? This is a very simple problem too, but there is massive political pressure to find solutions which produce more corruption.
Last I read the strike price for offshore wind was about half of that for nuclear power (Hinkley Point). In other words the "huge subsidies" aren't going to who you think they are.
You don't understand what a subsidy is. Offshore wind subsidies are taken out of electricity bills, not the price. The price you are seeing does not include the subsidy.
The reason why Hinkley Point is expensive is completely solvable. The reason why it is expensive is because it is supposed to be expensive, that is the purpose. An A road near me has required two lanes, so far they have spent near £100m over twenty years and have not built anything. The basic premise of the UK political system is that people have no idea what the price of anything should be because it is all a political fiction.
When the costing was done for Hinkley 10 years ago the price was going to be, iirc, something like 50% above the price of gas which was at record lows. This was regarded as extremely expensive...electricity prices are up multiples and multiples since then. Since then, you have had armies of lawyers, consultants, lobbyists, planners working on the project full-time...and you are asking why it is expensive? Thinking this requires knowing so little about how much nuclear costs around the world and having literally zero idea about infra projects work in the UK (spoiler: there is massive corruption at almost every level, tens of billions in graft every year).
Yes, offshore wind has CFDs too. If you are building an offshore wind farm, you are spending lots of money to construct something that isn't a low-cost operator and will likely cause significant economic issues with customer's ability to pay you...therefore, CFD. This is how the government was able to intervene to cause non-economic outcomes.
And yes, as I explain above but which you seem to have not read...there was unbelievable levels of graft involved with Hinkley. EDF is not the victim, the reason why the CFD is there is to pay suppliers to EDF which are: lawyers, consultants, planners, etc. At some point, someone may get paid for building a nuclear power plant but that is a largely accidental outcome. If you compare to what other countries with functioning political systems, Korea for example, it is multiples. The costs and prices are so ludicrous, so out of control that no-one could think they make economic sense...and, of course, they don't. It is just corruption.
Non CfD offshore wind farms probably can be economical without CfD if they had access to very cheap capital. But without CfD the risk is higher and so is the profit margin on the debt which ultimately makes it more expensive to generate the electricity which in turns increases risk of low wholesale prices.
Also, for years CfD rates were actually lower than wholesale price and are currently generating at lower strike prices than average wholesale prices. The problem now is more inflation, capital costs, and commodity prices for materials. But then a lot of other things are more expensive also.
General question because I'm ignorant of UK internal politics: are the Isles' energy prices just generally higher? There aren't any large sources of fossil fuels or natural gas that aren't offshore, right? And the coal got significantly used up by hundreds upon hundreds of years of mining.
I'm wondering if really, the causality is reversed: it's not that the renewables make energy expensive in the UK, it's that energy is expensive in the UK, which incentivized construction of a lot of renewables, because they're an overall cheaper source of energy long-term since you don't have to either pay your neighbors to import them or build rigs in the saltwater ocean?
Yes, there are massive onshore reserves. The Tory government that has been accused on here of pimping the environment immediately banned all exploration.
There is are also two relatively big offshore fields that were taken to a very late stage of development and then stopped because of opposition by local government.
I would research exactly how big the gap is with other countries (and, remember, retail price is subsidised). The Cameron government made the active decision to order companies to shut down power plants with no plans for replacement. To be clear, nothing about energy...this is jut electricity provision. There was no economic incentive, that is why tens of billions were given to energy companies to produce non-economic, expensive power with guaranteed payments.
There was some research done last year iirc: if the UK paid zero for gas, the price of electricity would not stop rising because of the government intervention.
It is reasonable that you assume something rational must be going on here. But that model does not apply in the UK. Politics took over from economics a long time ago.
There are still large untapped known fields in the North Sea within UK waters adjacent to the same that Norway are still profitably using. There is also vast swathes of UK waters that are unexplored, and are currently artificially expensive to do so due to UK taxation on fossil fuel companies.
The price of petrol at the pump is at least 50% Government direct tax - fuel duty, VAT (which multiplies the duty value - very cheeky). Then the other parts - wholesale price, retailer profit, delivery costs, have their tax implicitly priced into that. That probably makes the overall Government take something like 70% of the price you pay.
As for coal, there's apparently about 600 million tons of accessible usable coal left, which at current UK usage is good for quite a few decades if not more.
The current government is banning wind turbines factories and billions of Pounds in investments because "China". It is too easy to blame the previous government(s) when the current one has no strategic thinking or plan, either.
The previous government was in power for 14 straight years. The current (useless) government only came into power in July 2024. Yes, I think the previous government should have some of the blame. Just to add, wind turbine factory investments have failed for a few other reasons too. One local to me fell through because it was no longer economically viable (local competition, low margin, and of course cheap imports)
Chinese company Ming Yang was planning to invest 1+ billion to build a factory in Scotland. They were going to be the local competition. UK government has just officially refused to approve it. This is a government decision based on politics and lobbying from other interests (US gov and EU competitors) and yet another U-turn for the government (as apparently gov was initially keen...).
Because? I just said. I'd rather _China_ don't own 1 billion pounds of our country's energy infrastructure. Are you being coy or are you seriously that naive?
Utterly perplexed you need more of an explanation.
And all those things you mentioned. I'd rather they were all home-grown but I can live with the French having a chunk of our Nuclear - because I like the French.
> Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy.
I will give credit to the person who got there before me. :)
Smoothing out price volatility is a big one.
But also it gives you options:
You can buy it "today" when its cheap and store it for when you need it (e.g. winter months).
You can also trade on that basis too. For example you can make a future-dated commitment to buy gas (knowing you have the storage available to take delivery). But if the situation changes and you later find you don't need it, you can sell that contract to someone else (or you can still take delivery and re-sell it). But you can't do any of that without having the ability to take delivery, because the person who sold you that future-dated contract will want both your money and to get the gas they sold you off their hands.
Because if you have enough renewables and storage to eliminate gas from the mix you are no longer paying gas prices. The more often that happens, the cheaper your bills get.
There is no international market for gas because export/import is physically complex. This is why gas is priced very differently despite it being chemically similar (unlike oil). Anyone who says anything different should be immediately disregarded as someone who should not have an opinion.
This is technically true for oil but there are two other factors. One, importing oil is environmentally-intensive and relies upon the assumption of free and open trade in oil...hopefully, the last few weeks have demonstrated why this is untrue. Two, the assumption is that mix of imports is not changing, because of high energy costs and reduction in North Sea production, UK refineries are shutting down so we are completely losing domestic capacity across the whole space. We aren't importing oil, we are importing refined products, losing domestic chemicals capacity, losing margin. Lower jobs, lower tax revenues, more reliance on imports.
The above take would be somewhat funny if we weren't ten years into seeing the consequences of this. At this point, we could be back to the stone age and you would have the same people screeching that inventing fire is dangerous (I worked in equity research in the mid-2010s...I remember when Cameron was really pushing hard for this, Clegg was saying how expensive nuclear is, etc. people in the industry were saying this would very badly...the issue is that the political cycle is far shorter than the economic cycle, all of this stuff is obvious but people in the UK run on the political cycle so if it isn't the newspapers, no-one normal reads them, next week then it will never happen...same issue with housing, exactly the same thing happened, we are now subsidising retail electricity which is impossible to get out of, I remember specifically this idea was thought of as an insane impossibility but producers were saying it would have to happen, and giving huge subsidies to producers...this is all obvious, obvious things happening are obvious, producers were fine, they get paid the subsidies but consumers are getting shafted AND consistently voting to get shafted).
Also, Roughs storage facility is in the sea...so I am not sure what "real estate" development was done here (the UK has been building 10-20% of the required growth in housing stock for something like two decades...again, the same people will be screeching about developers if we lived in caves). The reason it was closed was due to economics.
For some reason, you deny that producing more gas would be useful but are outraged at a storage facility closing when the primary function of a storage facility is to allow energy producers to arb derivatives markets effectively. I have no idea how this makes sense to you based on all of the above...perhaps you just want to complain about the Tories? I have no idea.
The current tax rate on North Sea production is 75%, there was ample opportunity for public benefit but multiple governments took that money and spent it on benefits. The reason why Norway has worked is because they incentivized exploration (again, something that you imply later would have no benefit...but okay). The policy of the last fifteen years has been to tax the industry heavily and disincentivize exploration. Revisiting this approach is extremely unpopular amongst all politicians which is why production has dropped. Even with this limitation, we have large gas fields that have been blocked (by the Tories btw) for environmental reasons.
This isn't complicated: if you want more oil and gas, produce it and create more incentives to produce it. The reality is that people want to have their cake and eat it: North Sea production is both very pointless but paying huge amounts of carbon to import from the Middle East is a good idea and we have to pay subsidies of 30-40% electricity bills to subsidies green production...which is also very profitable but requires subsidies because of Tory developers or something.
The UK isn't a serious country. What is happening to the UK is a reflection of phenomenally poor political leadership. It is deserved.
> paying huge amounts of carbon to import from the Middle East is a good idea
You are wrong here.
UK oil has a very high carbon footprint.
British North Sea oil is sour (high in sulphur). It is the "wrong" type of oil for UK refineries. So it gets sent to other countries around the world for refining.
UK oil is viscous, waxy, crude which needs to be heated to pipe it. This means it takes a lot of energy to pipe (hello carbon footprint !) and it is not compatible with UK refineries anyway, so it has to be moved overseas (hello carbon footprint !!).
UK crude is nothing like Norwegian crude and massively different from the stuff drilled in the Middle East which requires barely any refining in comparison.
Brent crude is a light, sweet oil. UK oil is extracted from same oilfields as Norways - little difference in quality - and the major extraction from both is Brent crude
I already gave the answer in my original post.... UK crude is the wrong type of oil for UK refineries.
Almost all UK refineries were built back in the day (late 60's/early 70's), before North Sea, when the UK was mostly importing oil from Libya and elsewhere in that region.
All the stuff from Libya and elsewhere is far removed from the viscous, waxy sludge that emerges from the North Sea. It requires a far less intensive refining process.
So if your refinery has been built for a low-intensity process you can't just bolt on the shit-ton of high-energy stuff required for waxy crude.
It isn't the wrong type of crude. Forties pipeline was directly connected to a refinery. That refinery is now shutting down because of high energy costs, high general costs of doing business, and the investment outlook for UK North Sea.
The solution even if this wasn't true is also simple: build more refineries. This is all within our control.
You also said above it takes "energy" to pipe...do you have no understanding of physics? How do you think stuff moves in a pipe. Dear God.
You also said above that Norwegian crude is different...it is not. Brent is a crude blend that includes UK and Norwegian crudes. The chemical differences are relatively small, Norwegian refineries import UK crude (I am using UK crude because, for some reason, you seem to think that is something exists in the real world...it is just Brent).
One of the most confidently wrong posts I have seen on here...and that is after you said that an offshore gas field was given over to real estate development. Lol.
You should consider a career in the Civil Service. You will fit in well.
> That begs the question why aren't we building refineries that can process our own oil
Putting aside the legal and "public appetite" aspects that someone else already mentioned, it all comes back to privitisation in the end.
Given that the extraction was privitised, clearly market theory dictates that you cannot then interfere with where the extracted oil goes.
So if a private company is deciding on refining then it will follow the path of most profit, i.e. build/expand vs use existing capacity elsewhere. Given that most oil companies are large multinationals they will likely also prioritise using their own facilities vs paying a third-party refinery.
And clearly at the time, carbon footprint was not on the agenda of the private companies, either directly or enforced via legislation.
The writing is on the wall that people, especially young people, don't want to be using fossil fuels anymore.
Refineries are expensive (like $10B for country scale) and take years to build.
Which begs the question, how much renewable energy can you get for $10B? And perhaps even faster?
But it's not that clear, because reality has these fractal trade offs and the future is typically pretty opaque. So then will/motivation because an issue too.
I ask the same question about why Canada sends most of it's oil to the US to be refined. The answer is usually the government doesn't allow it and/or no one wants to take a private capital risk in the economic environment.
With electric resistance heating you can gen very high temperatures, but with less than 100% efficiency. With electric arc heating you can melt steel, but again less than 100% efficient.
> Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications.
They do if you start from ambient temperature, but they can be more effective if they are pumping heat out of the waste heat stream of a process. This requires different working fluids than lower temperature systems, though.
Most industrial heat energy is not consumed at very high temperature. IIRC, 2/3rds is at less than 300 C.
Electric resistance heating might also allow PV to dispense with auxiliary equipment, like inverters, so even if inefficient that might not matter as much. Heat also allows easy long duration storage at scale, even at rather high temperature, so resistive heating can be used with intermittently available cheap surplus power.
For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient. This process is accounting for 1–2% of global energy consumption, 3% of global carbon emissions, and 3% to 5% of natural gas consumption.
Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Heating storage (also cold storage) in industrial applications is possible and is done, but in many cases you are limited by allowed temperature range of chemical/physical processes. For example you are limited on the lower side by melting temperature of material and on higher side by high temperature corrosion.
In cement industries models have been developed to flatten the grid's hourly demand curve by minimizing the industrial customer's hourly peak loads and maximizing the shifting of demand to off-peak periods.
> For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient.
I should note that this process doesn't require external heat input (except at startup). The reaction is exothermic and the excess heat is used to make steam that either is used to make power or to provide steam to other processes. It does require pressurization, but that's an input of work, not heat.
It would be nice if the process could be run at lower temperature, but we just don't have the catalysts for that.
> Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Electric resistance heat is very storable and can provide heat 24/7, possibly even 24/7/365 at high latitude with PV.
That's cool but who is going to pay the upfront cost for the heat pumps?
The sources I could find say we currently have 412 heat pumps per 100k people in the UK.
Ordinary people can't just afford to drop 10k for a heat pump + installation for it to pay for itself 20 years down the line.
You have to include the costs of conversion - gas power plant. Also you have some some losses during conversion from heat to electricity, a modern gas power plant can be up to 60% efficient.
This claim is the sort of dangerous ideological nonsense that is so common in Britain, and which has wrecked it. Literally every time socialist policies fail people come out of the woodwork to blame privatization, and yet invariably this made things better despite an often botched process. The American oil/gas industry is fully private and yet they have much cheaper energy: blaming Thatcher is dumb and not the answer.
Gas in the UK is expensive because successive British governments wanted to have nothing to do with it and did everything they could to crush the suppliers. They thought deliberately deindustrializing the country was moral and ethical, for "climate" reasons. So they:
• Imposed massive "windfall" taxes on the industry to the extent that nobody developed new sources
• Then imposed very high carbon prices on it
• Banned fracking
• Stopped issuing licenses for exploration
• Imposed price caps
• Chased all the industry that needed cheap energy away to Asia
• Shut down gas storage facilities, exposing Britain to the global spot price
• Didn't build other reliable energy sources like nuclear or coal
End result: high prices and shortages. There are graphs here that show how much of the British electricity price is artificially created by government:
Other countries didn't make all these mistakes together. And they were mistakes by the government. Really, can you even claim the British energy industry is private when the government takes 80%+ of its profits? Socialist policies always create shortages and high prices. Always.
The UK (and Europe) could produce much more gas and consequently control prices if they wanted. It is easy to always blame the previous government(s) but the current situation is policy across Western Europe.
Edit: puzzled by the blunt downvotes for stating a noncontroversial fact. Over the last 15 years the US has invested in shale gas while the UK and EU have banned it. Even today the UK refuses expension of North Sea gas extraction. Whatever the reasons (environment, decarbonisation) it does mean that the situation we have now with gas across Western Europe is policy, not an unfortunate consequence of world events...
To be fair, I think you would be hard pushed to find anyone outside Israel who seriously thought Iran would ever be on the cards.
Netanyahu dedicated 40 years of his life going to various US presidents trying to get their buy-in. The US presidents all clearly listened to what their advisors had to say regarding Hormuz etc. and said "Thanks, but no thanks" to Netanyahu. Then Trump came along who was ready to over-rule his advisors and surrounded himself with yes-men in his cabinet.
I'm not being political here. A lot of it is public, for example just go to YouTube and look up the decades of videos of Netanyahu visiting the UN or US repeating the same line about "Iran being weeks away from a bomb", almost word-for-word for the last 40 years.
I don't think Trump particularily cares himself. But he's surrounded by weird religious cult who all think that attacking Iran and bringing in war in the middle east will bring on the end times and second coming of jesus christ. I honestly wish this was just a facade for attaining political power, but these nutjobs seem completely earnest in their beliefs.
Combining those god awful beliefs with a set of advisors with room temperature IQs (and I'm in canada where we use metric temps) results in a true inability to forsee any of these issues in advance. Real shame, I can only hope it drives your populace to finally do something about it, but I won't hold my breath.
No, this has nothing to do with either. It is policy in the UK and EU not to produce gas on environmental and decarbonisation grounds, and so in fact high priced are policy.
California is a great example; highest electricity prices in the US (not counting Hawaii, which makes sense) despite significant hydro and fantastic solar capacity. In the last few years California runs 100% renewable on many days (and growing) every year.
Economics 101: prices are not set by what goods cost to create + markup. Prices are set by how much people are willing to pay.
Why is it "people are willing to pay" and not "corporations are brazen enough to charge"? These utilities are necessities and relatively few people have access to cheaper alternatives to them.
Because, under usual circumstances, self-interested corporations compete against each other to get as close to what people are willing to pay for energy as possible.
There’s a reason most universities don’t hand you a bachelors degree in economics as soon as you complete EC101. You should look into EC102 and the rest of the curriculum.
PG&E's prices are not a function of what people will pay though, it's a function of what people expect.
CA wants green energy now (aggressive targets), needs to have fire hardened infrastructure (expensive upgrades), and wants full service to sprawling remote areas using modern infrastructure.
The combination of these is incredibly expensive.
If you don't believe me, buy PGE stock and get your dividend from their "greed". But honestly, the stock is an awful performer, because the actual problems facing them are real.
I know nothing about California so please correct me if I'm wrong.
You mention significant hydro and solar capacity in California. So minimal carbon externality: lung disease and climate change. If you consider that externalised cost into the cost of electricity elsewhere, does not California and other renewable-rich electric grids fare more competitive on price?
E.g. the problem is not the expensive renewables in California, rather, the problem is that the cost of declining human and animal health and climate change is externalised for the fossil fuel.
According to the official tracker (https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/clean-energy-serving-... and elsewhere) there were 279 days in 2025 where California was on 100% renewable for _some_ time during the day (could be hours, could be minutes at mid-day).
In total hours equivalent of 77.3 full days over 2025.
California has high volumetric rates, but mostly that is because it has much more distributed generation than any other state, uses far less grid power, so the grid rates are dominated by fixed grid costs. Actual monthly electric bills in California are not remarkable at all. According to the EIA the typical residential electric bill in California is almost exactly the same as Texas: $174.59 vs. $173.94.
Yeah I'm in the UK and for electricity, I'm on the green Octopus Agile tariff, which tracks the wholesale price updating every 30 mins. Given the abundant green energy today, and peak times between 3-7pm, right this second I'm paying £0.02/kWh, but at 6pm, I'll be charged £0.40/kWh. In the coming months with gas supply reduced, and consumer demand steady, it will have a knock on impact to me given it tracks wholesale cost so I'll have to consider moving off the tariff given I'll be paying more overall.
You can read more about gas markets in the Global Gas Market guide by A115 here: https://a115.co.uk/global-gas-market/ (you can download the PDF guide at the bottom without giving any information)
I've read this before and I don't understand how this doesn't become/is untenable.
Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
Also, this would mean that in order to really bring the price down, gas needs to be taken out as a source. But gas is typically the source that balances the grid because its output can be changed quickly. So price wise, you might get a drop but you would lose your ability to react quickly to fluctuations in demand
> Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
I used to work in wind energy in the Netherlands, it is only profitable there due to government subsidies. It was/is an enormously complicated system to understand on the whole. I was on the environmental impact side (visualizations) during the permitting process. It's high-risk & enormously expensive during the permitting process (i.e. getting permission to build the wind farm), and beyond that I understand it's a bidding process and again, super complicated on the energy trading side once you're operating. My experience was that the wind farm operators seemed to be doing well financially, but insanely lucrative? I'm not sure about that vs. non-renewables. Everyone I worked with (including myself) believed in green energy as a part of a larger mission to make the world a slightly better place. EU directives on renewables is what pushed the mission forward; the dutch on the whole (surprisingly), do not love wind turbines in their back yard.
:-( I'm sitting here looking at huge wind turbines out my front window and I absolutely LOVE them. I get to live in a solarpunk future where I can get where I need to without a car, my kids run out the door and play without getting run over, and I can see clean energy being made for my home (and that of my neighbours).
I'm sure a lot of the cranky old people near me don't like them, but they hate everything and go out of their way to find things to complain about, to be honest.
Frankly I feel the same as you. I saw my first wind turbine in Newcastle Australia and was completely blown away & wanted to work in wind energy. I've been to Denmark and seen the Vestas V-164 offshore turbine at the on-shore test facility. The rotor area on the V-164 seems as big as a football field - it's the largest rotating object I've ever seen and my mind could barely understand the scale of it. For me, wind turbines are beautiful. I was called crazy a lot in the Netherlands ;-)
In terms of public acceptance, you're probably right. The Dutch in my experience love the old windmills, but modern wind turbines are in a different league in terms of harvesting the power of wind efficiently. Blade design is comparable to the aircraft wing design (seriously complex engineering).
In my post above I talked about seeing the Vestas V164 in person, but I've also been on top of the tallest wind turbine in NL (manufactured by Lagerwey). The higher the nacelle and the larger the rotor diameter equal more power generation (the higher you go the more wind you'll find), but public acceptance has a lot to do with things.
I've seen in person how the Dutch can lose their mind over wind projects, I was in Drenthe in 2014 at a public engagement night (where the public sees visualizations of the turbines, and learns how they can benefit and so on...). At Drenethe there were hundreds of locals protesting, cops, drama. Super scary. I was involved on the public acceptance side of things and have come face to face with countless thousands of scared and angry people. I can't imagine what selling a HUGE turbine for their backyard might be like, but going back to your original idea - selling a classic looking windmill would likely be very easy. The tradeoff is that classic windmill would likely generate a negligible amount of energy in comparison. But cool idea anyhow ;-)
I don't think that's true. For one because the size is what makes it efficient/worth it. Second, the old windmills have all been there forever, so no one complains because they don't know any better.
Keep in mind that a typical windmill and a wind turbine are very different in size. Some people are afraid of noise, or shade. Especially if your home will be shaded by the blades, I could see that being an issue as you have flickering light all the time.
Renewables (and nuclear) have high up front costs and comparitively low marginal cost. Comparing it against something that burns expensive fuel can be misleading (if you want it to be).
One system is taking the money and turning round and handing it to their fuel suppliers, the other is turning round and handing it to the people who loaned them money to build a giant complex structure that would take a decade or more of risk and uncertainty to pay itself back.
Gas bids high because it literally makes no business sense for them to operate for less than the gas input costs. They'd rather sit it out when electricity prices are lower. Renewables will take almost any price once built because wind and sun is free, but won't build in the first place without a path to paying off their investment over a certain timespan.
(This is why more solar has been built in places with good low risk finance than where the sunlight resource is strongest)
CfDs are a competitive bidding process and so give a market price for what developers need their price to be over 15 years or more for it to make a standard return on investment. Developers outside this process need to guess what electricity prices will be, at the times they generate for years to come.
Yes, and I think that’s actually intentional, they’re rewarding renewables way over the odds without needing to give politically controversial benefits. The rewards are just an inherent result of the existing system. This is why renewables are growing rapidly in the uk.
Of course we’ll need a way to resolve fluctuations both rapid and slower. Rapid fluctuations are handled by pumped hydro and increasingly by batteries.
The slow fluctuations (day/night all the way to summer/winter and good/bad weather patterns) are much trickier, I think it’s still unclear how well handle them, but it will certainly be partly handled by having an excess of renewables, though we’ll likely need some other solutions too, nuclear is probably one of them.
The irony is that your comment should be entirely inverted. Renewables are not rewarded way over the odds - in fact the ruling party banned onshore wind entirely and i remember them banning at least one offshore wind farm. Luckily it is very cheap to build.
Now Hinkley Point C is another story. It's a hugely expensive boondoggle which is taking decades to construct at enormous cost and the reward at the end is that they are rewarded with a strike price that is 3x that of solar and wind. That is an obsecene subsidy forced on to customers for a power source that cant even do load following and doesnt help with fluctuations in supply and demand.
The slow fluctuations on cold, windless nights or when nuke plants are down for unplanned maintenance are going to be managed with gas.
Maybe one day it'll be gas synthesized with electricity from solar+wind overproduction on a day like today. The roundtrip is expensive, but will still be cheaper than nuclear power on a windy, summer day.
> Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
This is how markets are supposed to work. It provides an economic incentive for production to increase, which is what we want.
Consider what happens if you develop a farming method to produce potatoes for a fraction of the usual cost, but you can only meet 10% of total demand at your local market. What price are you going to sell your potatoes for when you show up to the market? You (like any free market seller) want to maximise your return, so you'll be able to sell for a fraction under the previous market rate, undercutting everyone else. Your farming method would be extremely lucrative.
Sure, but those same free markets will happily see those expensive producers go out of business. In the electricity scenario, that would mean blackouts.
If you triple the price, you don't have a new gas plant appear out of thin air. And the result won't really be lower consumption either, because most people would have fixed rate contracts (not in the UK so don't know specifically, but this is very common elsewhere)
> Sure, but those same free markets will happily see those expensive producers go out of business.
No, because remember you are only able to meet 10% of market demand. The expensive producers will still get 90% of the business, and the market price for their product will remain basically the same. This is what we observe in the electricity markets today: the price to us is the cost of the most expensive product. The cheaper producers who cannot meet the full market demand still get to sell at the cost of the most expensive product.
> The cheaper producers who cannot meet the full market demand still get to sell at the cost of the most expensive product.
Which would mean it's super lucrative and your same laws of economics will tell you that that means they'll be building like crazy.
My while point was that as soon as you get to a day where no gas is needed you've lost the ability to react quickly because no supplier will just leave a gas plant around just for that
Yes, but here’s the thing: you don’t have a monopoly over your potato farming method. Lots of new farms are built, and the more that do, the more the average price of a potato drops. Your expected return starts to drop. Yours - and everyone else’s - profit margins get squeezed.
Investors begin to refuse to build new potato farms because a return on their investment gets worse whenever anyone decides to build a new farm.
But the people need potatoes and more potato farms! The government issues an incentive scheme to guarantee a minimum price for each potato sold. Potential farm owners bid against each other for the lowest price, but it means they can build a farm and expect to break even.
> Investors begin to refuse to build new potato farms because a return on their investment gets worse whenever anyone decides to build a new farm.
If they all refuse, then they're leaving money on the table. One investor could invest in 10% production only, and that would be very lucrative. It would be exactly my low cost to produce potato scenario.
In practice, they don't all refuse, or all invest. The market finds a balance. In time, producers switch to the new method, because anybody who doesn't leaves an opportunity for someone else to take their business and make more money.
This takes time, though. If we want things to go quicker, then we need to guarantee return on investment for longer, which is exactly what the government does by guaranteeing prices to renewable energy producers.
Not only is it insanely lucrative, but the government enters into "contract for difference" contracts that guarantees a price per MWh that are generally above market rates, taking out most of the financial risk.
They aren't orthogonal - the reason that gas is being used is because renewable can't reliably power the grid! If you look at something like https://grid.iamkate.com/ you can see that in the last 24 hours the gas peak is when the wind dies down and the sun isn't shining, around 6-8pm. Happens to be a real price peak at that time. This isn't some weird and unexpected outcome, we've had at least a decade of evidence with this sort of low-wholesale-high-retail price dynamic.
That isn't gas is expensive, it is simply policy that the UK, rather naively, is trying to run their grid 24/7 based on processes that are not available 24/7. That is an expensive trick to try and pull off. Poor people need a way to signal that they won't use electricity in the evening if they want to be able to afford power is my read on the situation. Not very civilised but if that is how the UK approaches reliable cheap energy as a target then it seems the most reasonable outcome.
Unfortunately for the UK, its geology means there isn't a lot of pumped hydropower storage unlike France, which is the cheapest way to bank intermittent renewables. In the places where there is pumped hydro capacity like Coire Glas, the operators are demanding the government guarantee they would be paid today's (natural gas generated) price to go ahead with construction, which would completely defeat the purpose of energy storage.
And yes, letting nuclear power dwindle was a political choice, spurred by short termist bean-counter thinking:
Seems like a very good case to get storage and power backup in people's homes. Industrial users could install their own gas fired generators. Residential consumers could have simple battery based backup, or even a generator which would double for helping during powerouts.
Bigger question is why they haven't already - these trends have been in place for a very long time and this current phase of the UK energy crisis has been on display for years. Anything legal and cost effective would have been done by now if the market had anything to say about it. Which suggests something odd is afoot. Maybe storage is more expensive than gas, maybe the UK government has regulated the option out of existence. Maybe something else.
Which, importantly, drives more renewables and storage development because it makes the renewables fantastically profitable to run: near zero cost for you, but paid the price set by gas.
Then when asked what method to price in the Swedish nuclear fleet having ~50% of capacity offline multiple times last year and France famously having 50% of the capacity offline during the energy crisis I always get crickets for answers.
It’s apparently fine when nuclear plants doesn’t deliver, but not renewables.
The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.
> The price for wholesale electricity is set by a bidding process, with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce a unit of electricity.
Without mentioning how Contracts for Difference (CfD) works, this is a slightly disingenuous oversimplification.
This is Telegraph for you.
The cost of electricity is not driven by green levies or net zero targets, but by gas prices, as gas is a backstop when all other sources are exhausted. Therefore electricity prices are pretty much tied to gas.
Obviously, Electricity is a National Security issue.
It's naive to state that the problem is gas prices.
Germany is seeing Steel, Automotive, and other hard science companies leave for that very reason.
The strategy should have been to build an energy architecture that reduces prices while being robust against force majeure events.
You can have dispatchable gas without that pricing structure, but having a grid without that pricing structure can't really function without major nationalization of power generation.
Marginal pricing is one of those things that at first sounds crazy, but when you delve into the topic, it's the only sensible way to have market pricing on electricity generation. The only real alternative would be a fully nationalized grid where the government buys up all the dispatachable power sources.
As long as there's a large variety of producers competing with eachother though, there's not really any good mechanism for them to collude to avoid expanding to 100%, especially when you add battery power providers and private persons with rooftop solar into the mix.
I think more likely than deciding to stop building more renewables, the renewable providers are just going be incentivized to start installing large batteries wherever they install renewable generation, so that they can flexibly decide if the current spot price is worth selling to the market, or whether it's better to just store the electricity that they generate so that they can sell it in 10 hours or whatever when the price is higher.
Which is great, because it creates a market pressure to build more storage, and at the most efficient place for that storage to be created (right next to where it's generated).
I know less about the UK's electrical grid, but at least in Germany, if renewables plus batteries are enough to cover electricity needs for normal day-to-day weather, there is more than enough biogas production in the country to save and store that biogas for the weeks-at-a-time periods where renewable shortfalls happen and batteries won't be enough to cover it.
On any given day Germany generates 7-8% of its electricity from biogas, which means that if instead of burning that gas each day for electricity, we stored it in our network of gas reservoirs, then every 13 days of the year that we don't dip into those reserves, that's a full day of electricity generation in gas that's stored.
____
Even if this is done with fossil-gas instead of biogas though, simply having enough renewables + batteries to cut gas out of day-to-day electrical generation, and using it only for backup would be enough to drastically lower prices for the majority of the year.
This is of course linked to the UKs renewable rollout (and to do with detaips around the UKs energy markets leading to gas dictating the price for noe), but completely misses the fact that the UKs spending isn't just spending but investment.
Will be interesting to see in five years time looks like, we could well see a scenario where the UK has abundant cheap electricity being exported to the rest of Europe. Will be interesting to hear what the sceptics holding some American states fossil fuel based grids up as examples think then.
None of this of couse factors in the fact that fossil fuels cannot be sustained if we want a livable planet. Factoring that in, payimg energy bills three times as high would be a good investment, if it protects the world we depend on, in my book at least.
These net zero targets were actually introduced by the right wing Conservative party in 2019 under Teresa May and passed with broad support across parties.
Now the same party has collapsed in support (for reasons unrelated to this target, which remains broadly popular with voters) and attacks the targets they introduced.
The title may be misleading, but IMO not for the reasons you mentioned. "90%" is based on generation right now, live. On the site from the post you can see that for the last day (24h) renewable generation was 66%, for the last week 46%, for the last year 42%. So it's nowhere near 90% renewable in general, but it is 90% at the moment (there's sunlight and good wind). Emissions on the website from the post are lower than on the website you linked - 107 g/kWh for the week, 124 for the year - but I don't know why that is.
Because nuclear. Which is a great 20th century French achievement !
If the EPR2 doesn’t spiral into costing £17.5bn per unit as the UK-PWR has, perhaps we can get them in to “rustle me up a nuclear power station” or two, in the words of Tony Blair.
The subsidies for the EPR2 fleet is a 10 euro cents per kWh CFD and interest free loans. With the first reactor coming online in 2038 at the earliest.
That sums up towards 20 cents per kWh in total.
It’s an absolutely horrifyingly expensive boondoggle before they have even started, and it won’t deliver any electricity in the relevant timeframes for electrifying industry and society.
On top of this EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for their existing paid off nuclear fleet. Let alone new builds.
And that is France which has been extremely protectionistic shielding their nuclear fleet from renewable
competition, and even then its already leaking in on pure economics.
A 10c€/kWh CfD is not strictly speaking a subsidy, at the government will recover the average market price.
That being said, the total cost per kWh could well reach 20c/kWh, which is ridiculous. It's not only not competitive against renewables, but also not competitive with natural gas (CCGT are probably around 10-15c€/kWh).
The average day ahead price in France in 2025 was 6 cents per kWh.
This is with carbon trading starting to make fossil production very expensive, on top of LNG fossil gas. Which will quickly start to diminish as more renewables and storage comes online.
While the CFD runs for 40 years so into the 2080s for all but the first reactor.
France has an amazingly developed grid, with a lot of nuclear. But I think there's a risk of seeing grid make ups as "one size fits all". Norway and Sweden do well with huge amounts of hydro storage, but few countries have the geography for that level of hydro. Similarly, the UK has an abundance of offshore wind (especially in Scotland), so further developing that (rather than focusing heavily on nuclear because it works in France) is by no means a bad idea.
Not any more they don't. Those were older reactor designs which nobody wants now. And the 5 years was first-pour to switch on. Add a few years for planning, permitting and actually supplying to the grid.
Newly approved Korean plans are aiming for 2038. Best of luck to them. I'm sceptical they'll make it.
If you're talking about uranium enrichment, that's like saying we increased the amount of gasoline on earth (by refining crude oil). Natural uranium is ~99% non-fissile, and ~1% fissile, and we're only removing part of the non-fissile isotope to obtain 5% concentration of the fissile isotope. Uranium still needs to be mined, spent fuel can be partially recycled, but you need some new natural uranium input in the end. That said, non-renewability of uranium is a non-issue IMO, compared to the huge amounts of other non-renewable resources we're extracting.
Yet still it costs several pounds a day to heat your home in winter. People are going back to log burners. I've never seen so much coal/wood sold at the supermarkets during winter. I've got some electric blankets which is great but really energy costs seem to be spiralling.
Adapting to a fossil fuel free society damands to comply to some inconveniences, like to afford some days without or expensive electricity, to change the time of device use, even to be used to lower home temperatures. For me the most difficult part is to persuade my wife to comply. Fortunately I have solar/battery/netmetering and I only pay a small amount for the network use.
Can people in Britain post their actual electricity rates per kWh?
I want us Californians to be able to see how badly we are (or aren’t) being ripped off by our utilities compared to you (mind you, these rates are approved by our regulator). We’re basically told we have to pay this much because of our lovely renewables requirements (they’re still far from 90% renewable though).
We are on a ‘time of use’ rate designed for EV charging at night.
We are paying 26 cents (£0.20) except for 4-9PM when it’s 59 cents (£0.44). Plus a monthly base charge which they just increased.
Those answers won't be too helpful. We have very high bills compared internationally, due to a difficult-to-explain quirk (pay-as-clear marginal pricing) where all electricity is charged to the customer at the highest rate possible at that moment. So wind may cost 0.05 pkwh and be freely available but if gas is being utilised anywhere else in the grid at a cost of eg. 0.45 then everybody gets charged 0.45 pkwh, even for the wind energy.
Its a messed up system which means often pay the highest in Europe, without even helping that much towards the tax coffers. But reform of this system does seem to be gaining a bit of political momentum.
The volumetric rate for electricity is almost totally irrelevant. California's bills are dominated by the fixed cost of the grid, and we use very little grid power compared to other states, so the volumetric rate has to be really high as a consequence. Electric power bills in California are in the middle of the pack compared to the other states, almost exactly the same as Texas and less than ten other states.
There are grid scale batteries on the UK grid. Surely they’re being used.
One could work out what the discrepancy between consumption and production during the day to infer the battery discharge rate, but I don’t think there’s anything there…
There has been talk, seemingly power generation dispatch a year or so ago was do e by phoning up the power station and saying “More amperes please Mr Woodbine”.
My understanding is this is being written to an automatic system which isn’t fully commissioned.
Grid battery owners a few years go were irate that they weren’t in the offing to sell power. But that must be resolved by now, since so much money is being invested in it.
Could be higher - multiple Scottish windfarms are fully curtailed (developers paid for generation but the grid can’t distribute so they don’t use the power). Once the grid is upgraded with Easter Green Link 1-5 & Western Link 2, and the Scotwind Windfarms built this would be even higher!
It's a biomass burning power plant. Biomass is absolutely renewable by any definition of "renewable". More can be grown on useful short term timescales.
Also, burning biomass does not affect the long term CO2 makeup of the atmosphere. The CO2 emitted was sequestered a decade ago, not 400 million years ago. Biomass carbon release is the normal carbon cycle of the earth.
It takes decades to grow the trees that then absorb the CO2 that is emitted from the burning, and the biomass that Drax burns has been (and still is) imported from Canada from felling old-growth forests (some of which have been estimated to be over 250 years old), and this isn't even considering the emissions from transporting the pellets via ship, rail and road from western Canada to eastern England which is not tracked against Drax.
The burning is still part of the short term carbon cycle, and biomass is still renewable.
Boreal forests in particular lose carbon sequestration capacity as they age, and from a carbon perspective cutting them down for lumber is a good thing. Wood pellets are generally from the waste material, not wood that could be used as lumber for houses or whatever.
You can certainly make other arguments in favor of not cutting down old growth forests, and certainly transport using fossil fuels is bad, but "I don't like how they go about it and also they release emissions that I don't care to understand how it fits into the carbon cycle" doesn't mean they "aren't renewable".
The point you could effectively make if you so chose would be "renewable energy sources are not cut and dry always a good thing".
This is a 'lawyer-worded' headline.
I am an enormous fan of renewables, I am an electrical engineer who designs control systems for renewables exclusively. My career depends on renewables.
Headlines like this do nobody any favors. The problem with renewables is that you cannot run a grid on renewables alone. Many days will have an abundant oversupply, like the day shown. Many days will not. Consumers are not tolerant of brownouts in the west. We need pump storage hydro, we need massive improvements to the transmission system, and we need battery storage plants (in that order).
Its fine to celebrate days of high renewable GW output, but people get out the GW Bush 'mission accomplished' banners a little early. The generation is the cheap and easy part. The rest is expensive and slow and needs way more focus than it's getting if we ever want to make progress in the west (China is already figuring it out)
Well, in the sense that it's possible to be eating zero calories in the time between meals. You still need the meals. If you're just looking at brief snapshots, it doesn't tell you much.
It was a widely considered impossible to have more than single digit percentage of renewables even for instantaneous figures. That "limit" has been raised again and again as the world gets more experience with it.
It's great that we've made so much progress that people can say "it's just 90% renewable for 30 mins" but that's a result of decades of hard work.
You are conflating ideas here and it's getting muddled up. Literally nobody ever said that we couldn't handle 100% renewables for brief periods. The single digit percentage you're referring to is not about the renewables, it's about when the renewables aren't there. Its about maintaining grid stability when you don't have dispatchable sources to do it with. Essentially what we've built is a system where the renewables provide a tertiary function- providing power when they want to, but not in a reliable way, so we still have the same carbon based dispatchable resources.
This is not a serious system. We've done a bit of work on th cheap, easy part. Installing some solar panels is easy and costs almost nothing. The storage and transmission of power is 90% of the actual work!
It is literally written into regulations in many places that renewables aren't allowed to go above certain percentages even for short periods e.g in Ireland they are raising the cap by 5% every so often with an aim to get to 95% by 2035, it's currently 75% and was 50% when they brought in that particular rule.
In Australia they keep reducing the number of synchronous generators that are required to be connected as they gain more experience.
Renewables started as fringe tech and are now a trillion dollar industry. But they faced skepticsims at every stage along the way.
Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?
I'm hoping for some other technology apart from pumped hydro or batteries to be used for capturing surplus renewable energy for later use. It's unfortunate that hydrogen seems to be too complex to handle at these scales, it'd be utopian if it wasn't and the excess of renewables could be transformed into hydrogen for use in turbines instead of nat gas...
> Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?
Scotland seems to be a perfect place for pumped storage. I see that UK has 4 pumped storage stations, 2 in Wales, 2 in Scotland. But Scotland being quite far from most of UK's population may not be ideal if we're talking about supporting the whole country with pumped storage. It would be like 600km to the south of England.
Yeah, the idea of people claiming that something on the Great Britain is too far and can't distribute power to something else on the Great Britain is laughable.
Next we'll have somebody from Lichtenstein saying the same about their country...
Well, I only said that if we're considering a ~fully renewable energy generation in the UK, with supply evened out by massive pumped storage projects, then locating all the storage in Scotland isn't ideal for the efficiency of the system. But yeah, I looked up the losses on HVDC lines, and it seems to be a non-issue (at least from a technical point of view). I also looked at a map of wind power[0] - seems concentrated on Scotland, so the distance from generation to potential storage would be quite short.
Pumped hydro needs a hill to pump up. That's why I said storage and transmission. We are laughably bad at moving power from where it is made (or stored) to where it is used and the worst part is it's not even a problem of science or engineering. We have it all figured out!
Somehow? It’s a well established and publicised fact that it’s due to the price of gas. It’s so well established that anyone posting a comment here about the high price of electricity without mentioning it has an ulterior motive.
It's also widely misunderstood. Just because the spot price of electricity is set by the price of gas doesn’t mean the consumer pays that price for all of their electricity.
A lot of wind and solar are on Contracts for Difference. That means when market prices go above the agreed level, the generator pays the difference back through the scheme, which reduces supplier costs rather than the generator simply keeping the whole windfall.
This is particularly relevant when e.g. the price of gas goes way up due to the Iran war, it doesn't mean that the consumer ends up paying more for the energy from wind
So who's working on fixing it? It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature. Meanwhile you have folks seeing these three things together:
- England is 90% renewables
- Renewables are a really cheap source of energy.
- England has very high energy prices.
And the obvious conclusion is that someone is lying. It's eroding support for renewables among those that don't have time to investigate how or why the spot price of gas sets the overall energy price.
The thing is, it's nowhere near 90% in general. 90% is the generation right now, with sunlight and good wind. On the site you can see that renewables were 66% in the last 24h, 46% in the last week, and 42% in the last year. I don't think it's possible to have 90% renewable generation overall without massive energy storage.
>It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature.
It kind of is.
Gas is the only source of electricity currently which can be scaled up and down at will and on demand.
Even once grids eventually go 100% green we will probably still use (green, synthesised) stored gas as the power source of last resort on cold, windless nights after batteries and pumped storage have been depleted.
A lot of wind power is generated in Scotland, for example. The power conduits that transmit power along the country can often not deliver all of that power to the South on a windy day. There is an excess of power in the north but the wind farms cannot deliver it, they are not paid to generate power so they switch their wind turbines off, even though there is wind available to capture.
This new test means that wind farms will not switch off in such conditions and electricity prices will be allowed to fall to zero, but only for those in the local area.
It’s not the same thing. Customers on some of Octopus’ tariffs get occasional zero or negative pricing to spur demand that can help balance the grid or reduce curtailment.
This trial is different. I think the real goal is to incentivise local communities to support the construction of wind farms. If you have a wind farm nearby, surplus generation is used to supply you with free power when otherwise the turbines would have been curtailed.
It's not only the price of gas but also the price of the co2 emissions. I'm really surprised the uk didn't get rid of it when they left the eu. It's one of the most stupid things possible. It only makes everything more expensive.
That would make British people less poor for once so they decided against it. Managed economic decline and mass immigration go hand in hand with globalism and ‘global warming’ extremists.
If you’ve got even a passing interest in the UK energy market you’d know this is because of the wholesale price of gas, not the actual wholesale cost of solar and wind.
If you really want to pay less for green energy, which is cheap when it’s plentiful (like anything) get on a variable tariff and install some storage.
> In the UK, the marginal unit is almost always a gas-fired power plant. As a result, one widely cited academic analysis found that gas set the price of power 97% of the time in the UK in 2021.
Stop seeing this through the eyes of a consumer. On a macro scale, your country is not handing hundreds of millions of pounds a day over to other countries. Now imagine if it still was. You'd be even worse off.
Almost every normal person sees this through the eyes of the consumer because paying the electric bill is their primary interaction with the issue. What you're describing is politically a tough sell.
I assume you are referring to Drax? That should come under biomass, which is 2.5% currently. I don't think the practice is great but that's clearly not where the energy is coming from. 87.7% of UK energy generation at this moment is coming from solar and wind.
It’s a bit more complex than that. Octopus do a deal where you can lease a car and get the energy for it for free provided you agree to have it plugged in > x hrs a month. My read on that is that the cost of balancing the grid is greater than the cost of generating power. So grid is expensive, but power is cheap.
And thats not how good renewables are- thats how deindustrialized britain has become. And deindustrialization leads to debt slavery - and debt slavery either leads to passing on that bitter chalice to others (empire) or to becoming a colony.
As you denindustrialize, your normal working class population rebells - demanding its lifestyle to remain untouched- thus subsidized by the state. So the state either prints money costing the world (us-model) or it prints money- costing the future. As this happens and future generations get poorer- the idea to lend from foreign "investors" which then take over your country becomes the default solution - until you are a debt colony, owned by those lending you money.
I'm on a electricity tariff where the per kWh unit price changes every 30 minutes, you're basically being charged at market rate or thereabouts, the prices for the next 28 hours are announced at 4pm every day.
Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately.
On really windy days you definitely get to see the benefit where prices drop to zero or even negative, which is great if you have an EV or something to dump lots of power into. Looking at todays prices they're like 1-3p p/kWh!
But that doesn't last, as the wind dies things start to get back to normal.
The key with the tariff though is to just play the averages and generally avoid high power usage during the peak periods. My average for the last 2 years was around 30% cheaper (p/year) than what I would have paid if I was on a normal energy tariff.
It will be interesting to see whether that trend continues, especially with the state the world has suddenly been thrown into.
I wonder if we'll start to see gimmicks in home appliances for taking advantage of variable prices.
Like for EV charging I assume it's a basic requirement, you simply wouldn't buy a car that didn't let you adjust the charging schedule based on cost.
But what about... Freezers? Maybe there are scenarios where your freezer could drop 20° below its usual temp while prices are low, and thereby avoid running the compressor for several hours while prices are high.
What about a tumble dryer button that says "these clothes are fine to stay wet for up to 8 hours, dry them at the cheapest moment during that window"?
TBH I doubt these things would really pay for themselves but as a consumer I'd still be tempted by the "lol, neat" factor.
Also I assume the local-LLM heads are already finding ways to have their agents do useful work while the GPU can churn tokens for almost-free.
Also makes me think of fun Home Assistant workflows. Like, "when energy is expensive, just try to keep the house between 16-26°. When energy approaches free, I want to live at exactly 20°". (I assume heat pumps also have ways to take advantage of this in more roundabout ways).
I think freezers would definitely be a gimmick as they don't really use that much power.
I can see it being a nice feature for higher-load tasks though, e.g. my dishwasher uses about 1.8kWh for a cycle. On this tariff it's trivial to compute the best start-end time based on the 30 minute price windows, so if the dishwasher could do that it would be pretty sweet. Right now my dishwasher just supports a 3h delay function. I wouldn't mind if my dishwasher had a (local) API you could hit to control its schedule. Sadly this usually comes with some cloud requirement though.
I think freezer could be comparable, no? How many cycles of dishwasher are you running per day?
Our Mitsubishi heat pump water heater has integration with some solar systems and weather services to attempt to time hot water production to solar peak.
We don't have solar panels but have a solar energy plan (cheap during the day, expensive during dawn/sundown, average overnight with fixed hourly schedule independent of actual production) so for us it's just programmed to follow a fixed schedule of prioritizing filling up during the solar hours and 100% forbidden from filling up during the expensive "duck curve" hours.
Things like freezers don't take a huge amount of power. It's definitely about things that do space heating/cooling. The traditional approach is to put your electric water heater on a timer. That way you can schedule your hot water use on a consistent schedule but only heat the water at night when you can be sure the rates are lower.
In my case I've got a contactor on the house power board that disconnects the hot water at night, so it's only heating off solar power. You can also get specialised solar diverters that do the same thing, but they cost literally ten times as much and only squeeze a tiny bit of extra efficiency out of the system.
If you do go down this path, make sure you insulate the crap out of the cylinder and surrounding water pipes, mine only heats once a day and that's once the sun's providing the power for it.
You can basically do that today if you wanted to by buying consumer grade batteries and smart switches. A whole house battery would be better, but it's more expensive to install.
For the tumble drier and dishwasher, those usually come with time delay features. That's usually good enough if your goal is to timeshift a load.
I have a battery for my fridge not for this purpose, but because I'd rather not have a power outage spoil my food.
With "smart" appliances that can be controlled, there's often a community integration to HomeAssistant ... and then there's the free EMHASS addon which will optimise for profit, or self consumption based on energy prices (both incoming and outgoing) as well as any on-site generation (e.g. Solar PV) batteries etc. etc.
Neat piece of open source software.
I'm following battery prices and you can now get 25kwh for 3.5k. This will be a solved problem a lot sooner for a lot of people.
A heat pump house uses perhaps 40-50kwh in deep winter.
> A heat pump house uses perhaps 40-50kwh in deep winter.
Over what time period, and where? My geothermal system draws about 1200 watts when heating our large house on the coldest days of the year
Just buy a home battery. Sheesh, there were solutions to problems before LLMs
Yeah this is the simplest solution. I'm hoping my next EV can do V2H and act as a home battery.
Yeah, but that’s strictly worse for some of these examples. You can’t overcome the loss of energy just going into the battery and getting it back and the there is the huge cost of the battery itself.
The freezer example would require like $10 of electronics assuming there isn’t already a WiFi chip in it.
Many homes in Norway has this. Its a smart plug in your fuse box. For me it offsets EV charging untill the electricity is at its cheapest, it also cuts down on heating for the peak hours etc etc.
There are devices to store hot water.
That's a great system. Like so many things, success comes down to implementation.
In California, for example, PG&E will charge you the maximum peak demand prices while simultaneously paying other states to take electricity during the solar duck curve.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880
Are you saying that they don’t let rate payers take advantage of low rates to advantage load shift?
That seems counterproductive and exploitative.
I have an EV and am on a Time of Use rate plane here in SF. My lowest rates are between 12am and 3pm every day. I charge the car and run everything I can in terms of major appliance use between these hours (dishwasher scheduled to start at midnight or manually run early in the day, washer/dryer loads run in the morning). I am home during the day which makes this easier to do though. Another solution of course would be to bank your solar generation or low rate electricity into a set of batteries that you could draw from during peak times.
PG&E doesn’t even give all its time-of-use ratepayers the same peak hours. The rates are nonsensical.
Australia has that in an even more extreme form, although it's more an emu curve there. In fact the CA one isn't really a duck any more either is it?
I'm on a similar tariff in the UK and just had a 10kwh battery installed which is just amazing for shaving off all the load between 4-7pm. Whole system installed was ~6k GBP and I think my payback time is going to be < 5 years which I'm super pleased with.
Would you mind sharing the tariff name and company?
I would also like to know the company name please.
Would love to get a Forster battery + invertor system installed. Seems like the battery is £2k for 16kWh and maybe £1k for an inverter? so interested in your cost breakdown.
https://www.fogstar.co.uk/collections/solar-battery-storage
How are the fixed costs in this? Here in Sweden I have seen a strong trend that as the grid has become more variable and connected to the European grid, a larger portion of the bill becomes fixed. For most part of the year, the fixed costs are now greater than costs that scale with consumption.
Transmission and construction, crewing and maintenance of of thermal power plants (under the name of "reserve energy") cost a lot of money, which in turn becomes fixed grid costs. On top of that you got consumption costs during periods of poor weather, which in combination of high fossil fuel costs means that the consumption prices spikes. The cost of energy during optimal weather conditions is in contrast so low that at this point they can basically just be rounded down to zero.
Chris Norbury, CEO of E.ON UK said:
"Some of the modelling we have suggests that you could get to a position by 2030 where if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be the same as where they are today because of the increase in non-commodity costs."
Fixed costs are enormous and are increasingly driven by paying for the CFDs that back up the economics of wind. The CFD scheme allows wind producers to de-risk from market prices by locking in a fixed price with the government who then recover this from bills.
So, yes you get to enjoy low variable costs when it's windy, but you pay for the priviledge year round.
I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy.
Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.
> I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy. Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.
The CfDs set a floor price when there’s lots electricity being generated by renewables but they also contribute to bills when the market price is over the strike price
Electricity bills are higher because we’ve had two fossils fuel shocks in the last 5 years and the costs for decarbonisation are added to electricity bills rather than gas ones
My friend has a car which can charge only when prices are low. I'm not totally sure how it works though, does the smart meter communicate this to the car?
Some chargers communicate directly with the energy supplier and charge at the cheaper rates.
You can do this yourself as well with home assistant (if your charger supports it) and some API calls. It's just a matter of telling the charger when to start and stop the charge. The rest of the communication between the charger and the car is some protocol I can't remember the name of.
Could be wrong but I guess it more likely communicates with the charger. The car will always try to draw if it's plugged in, but most chargers can be switched on ("charge") and off ("don't charge") remotely. It's probably quite trivial to have something watch the price of power and on/off as appropriate
Energy providers use whatever internet API there is for either chargers or cars.
Octopus UK has a list of charger models and car brands they support for their special tariff for cheap off-peak EV charging.
The charging cable has a protocol for negotiating power, so either side can pause and restart charging.
My car hits the api for my power company and knows how much charge it needs and plans out its charging schedule, always avoids peak.
No the smart meter communicate with the charger.
Or the car. Octopus in the UK can control both cars and chargers depending on compatibility. They control my Tesla as my charger isn’t compatible.
Why did you choose this plan in place of a fixed price plan?
Explained above, I WFH, single (no kids) and have an EV - but I don't use the car for commute etc so I can be choosy about when I charge the car and take advantage of the ultra cheap periods.
Fixed price advantage is you use power whenever you want. Your average unit rate is just the price on the tariff. Predictable and safe.
Agile price changes every 30 minutes, so you need to do a little planning. But if you take advantage of the cheap periods you'll generally come out on top. My average unit rate last year was like 16.5p p/kWh whereas the standard tariff was 23-24p, so some nice savings. There's also some risk involved - the price can go up to £1 p/kWh and a few days in winter in 2024 it did that for a short while (around the peak periods) so you have to take on that risk - and obviously being exposed to the world energy markets does mean you get exposure to stuff like wars impacting global markets.
I mean there's nothing stopping you from using lots of power between 4pm-7pm it's just you'll drag that average unit rate up to the point where it's probably not worth it. When I say "use lots of power" I don't mean like I sit in the dark between 4-7pm, it's just I avoid the big ticket power users like ovens, showers, cookers etc
Yeah, and the really important point is that you get to see the prices a day ahead, which is what makes it actually pretty easy to live with.
For instance, if I know it's going to be expensive when I'd be cooking tomorrow's evening meal, then I won't make something that would need a long time in the oven. And if it's going to be particularly cheap around lunchtime, then I'll plan to do a big load of laundry then.
I have electric heating, which I thought might be a cause of anxiety but it's not really worked out that way. The temperature in my flat won't go down by more than a degree or two with the heating off over the course of the sort of 4 hour price spikes you tend to see in mid-January. If it looks like it's going to be unusually bad, I could always raise the temp by half a degree beforehand, but in reality I've only bothered to do that maybe three times in the past couple of years.
Basically, it's just another thing to factor in when planning my day. No more of a hassle than checking the weather forecast or glancing at my calendar.
> Basically, it's just another thing to factor in when planning my day. No more of a hassle than checking the weather forecast or glancing at my calendar.
Sounds like an incredible hassle at a level I would pay hundreds of dollars per month to avoid. That sort of mental overhead is crazy to me. But I'm also someone who finds having a single event on my calendar for the day disrupts my productivity and mental peace to an absurd level.
Time of day billing is definitely the future for renewables though, once they hit a saturation point for the grid it's the only thing that makes any sort of sense. Perhaps residential is the last place it needs to happen, but eventually it will be the norm. I see it working more in an automated fashion though. Smart load centers (panels), smart appliances, etc. that are connected to the local power company's API. Then you set some rules around it.
Stuff like cooking dinner though? I cannot imagine planning my day around saving a couple bucks. That's just insane to me. Energy use and all this mechanization/automation/technology exists to make life more convenient in the first place! Stuff like EV charging, raising/lowering temps in anticipation of power pricing, laundry (dryer) scheduling, etc. seems to be where 80% of the wins can be made, and are all much more automatable to avoid having to think about it. That last 20% can simply be taken up by whole-home battery storage, which by the time any of this happens at scale will be pretty much the norm.
The thing that concerns me most though are regional "seasonal" events where a once-a-decade lul in energy production happens and there is simply not enough dispatchable power on the grid to meet demand due to everyone hyper-optimizing their loads in such a fashion.
> That sort of mental overhead is crazy to me.
I've been on the tariff for 2 years now, at first I was looking at the prices every day, but over time you get used to how it works and the price watching starts to tail off. The rule of thumb is just to avoid high load stuff during the peak window (load shift) - sticking to those principles you generally come out of on top. Playing the averages is the key.
Nowadays I don't really look at the prices that much other than when it's windy as I might be tempted to charge the car.
That being said though, if current world events continue and the energy situation degrades further - causing my average unit rate to start creeping up, I might consider getting a home battery , solar etc to compensate, or leave the tariff entirely.
Some people enjoy this sort of hyper optimisation, even if they don't really need to do it.
Yeah, it's definitely a bit of a game for me, and my electricity bill was already low enough that the savings are trivial.
But I'm the sort of person who enjoys being flexible when planning my day. I'll fit chores such as laundry around work meetings. Decide whether to go for a lunchtime run (and thus have an extra shower) based on the weather and having an a big enough gap in my day. Buy ingredients for dinner based on the weather and how I'm feeling. Expected energy cost is just another factor in the mix - and one that only rarely becomes decisive.
The closest the UK grid has ever come to not being able to cover demand was a few years ago when most of our nuclear fleet went offline at the same time in the middle of a January cold snap due to the discovery of a potential maintenance problem in the steam plant. If there were to be a repeat of that scenario, then the spread of domestic dynamic pricing would actually help matters by driving load shifting behaviour.
Bananas. I hope you do this because it appeals to you at some level.
A decade back, in the US, the local power company would give you a discount if you used less energy than average during peak hours. At the time I had a vacant rental, very little energy use. (FWIW I’ve since sold it, being a landlord isn’t a good time)
I watched a specific neighbor go through great pains to honor this system and so as to reap the benefits of a much lower bill. Sweating their buns off during the hottest part of the day, open windows, no tv on, etc. fully committed.
They saved 8 dollars that month. My vacant rental, not doing a goddamn thing, saved 6 dollars.
If your system is similar, you’re optimizing your life around the cost of a monthly Netflix subscription, at best.
There is an element of truth in that if you go to the extremes, where it's almost definitely not worth it.
I don't sit in the dark during the peak times, during the week I'm working during that time anyway and I still have my monitors etc on. It's just I don't usage high-draw appliances like cookers during that time. I eat dinner after 7pm anyway.
Also I have an EV, but don't commute or travel long distances regularly, so I charge my car when opportunity strikes, especially when the prices go negative - this means I don't really spend that much on fuel really. The savings really start to come in if you have "bursty" high energy stuff that can take advantage of the cheapest periods like an EV or home battery. If you just have "baseload" stuff that runs all day like A/C or whatever then yeah you won't really see any significant savings.
I contend you’re still saving the cost of a lunch meal… per month.
Not GP but I assume the fixed prices have to be fairly high to account for people using lots of power during peak demand when most people use lots of power?
Exactly.
For me I'm happy to avoid big power draws during the peak times, as I'm 'compensated' for it outside of those periods with a little planning. Downside is when the wind is not blowing AND disruptions to global energy markets - I'm exposed to that, warts and all, there's definitely been an increase in prices over the past 4 weeks, although there has been a few days (including today) where the wind has basically made the energy free and my average unit rate is dropping again.
It's not only that, you also need reserve for the intermittent sources like wind and solar.
I live on an island, we have big batteries that can supply up to 15 MW of power for a period. In the Netherlands we have natural gas plants that are called up when the wind or sun output decreases, lest the grid frequency drop.
....that being said, when you see stuff like this page and news articles about cheap renewable power etc, there are A LOT of negative reactions to it (even evidenced by the comments on here!) because for most people in the UK they never really see any direct benefit - energy prices seem to keep going up and a lot of people are on contracts with fixed rates that rise often.
I'm not sure what the solution is, I know that the price of electricty is dictated by gas so maybe decoupling that will help - but that probably has complications with balancing the grid.
The tariff I'm on (Octopus Agile) suits me as I WFH, have an EV and it's just me living in the house, I can move my usage outside of hte peak periods quite easily and I built a website to help me find the cheapest charging periods for my car based on the prices for the next day. The other day my average unit rate was like 2p per/kWh and I dumped like 30kWh into my car lol
Yes - the wholesale price of electricity can sometimes be very low (or negative), particularly when there is a lot of wind. And some tariffs pass that on to consumers. But I don't see how it works at scale.
This is because the wind farms don't get paid the wholesale price. They get paid their guaranteed, index-linked CFD strike price. This means that, for every £1/MWh drop in the wholesale price, they get an exactly matching extra £1/MWh to top them back up to their strike price. They can bid a low price into the market safe in the knowledge they'll get paid their CFD price.
And that top-up has to be paid by somebody: either other bill payers, or the taxpayer.
That wouldn't be so bad if the strike prices were low. But they're not. The recent "Allocation Rounds" guaranteed offshore wind farms in excess of GBP100/MWh, index linked for at least 15 years.
To put it in context, these numbers are higher than the wholesale gas price - even with an uplift for carbon externalities - for all but the worst period of the Ukraine invasion a few years back.
But it gets worse: on top of these extremely high fixed prices for wind, we also have to pay for the installation of tens of billions of pounds (if not more) of new grid connections, because the wind farms are nowhere near the centres of demand. This cost is also added to bills.
It doesn't end there. Readers may be aware that the wind doesn't always blow. Which means we need something that's able to spin up or down on demand. In the UK, that means gas. So we have the ridiculous situation of having to pay the gas plants to sit around doing nothing, just so we can call on them at minimal notice when needed. And remember: there can be long periods with basically zero wind or solar (the famous 'dunkelflaute' phenomenon in winter).
This means we need non-wind capacity pretty much equal to peak winter demand, in order to be safe during the week or so some years when there's no wind.
So we're paying to build and maintain TWO generation systems in parallel.
This is why electricity costs in the UK are on an ever-upwards trajectory: all these 'policy costs' are added to the wholesale price, and are a large and growing component of the _retail_ price that most consumers pay.
Depressingly, 'storage' doesn't fix this. Indeed, it's a fun exercise to calculate how much electrical energy is consumed in the peak of winter in the UK over a one- or two-week period and then figure out how much the necessary battery capacity would cost... or, even more fun, how many Welsh and Scottish valleys we'd need to flood to create the pumped-storage capacity. We're talking tens of trillions of pounds.
I fear the UK has, with the best of intentions, made a mistake of generation-defining proportions with its bet on wind :(
In other words, betting on wind (or sun) where there is little wind (and sun) is not an optimal choice. But folks on HN were telling otherwise. Who might’ve known…
If it’s all due to the reliance on wind and the floor price CfDs set why does the price spike when oil and gas prices rise?
It's a good question. To be honest, I'm still trying to get my head around how the UK electricity market works. Its complexity is definitely a big part of why so many reasonable people can end up disagreeing so vehemently... vanishingly few people understand how the whole thing works (and pretty much none of those who do are listened to by the politicians...)
Your question is good for another reason: you say "price" without qualifying whether you mean wholesale or retail (and, if retail, what individual households pay or what is experienced by industry). A lot of commentators and politicians routinely conflate the concepts to serve their own agendas in order to confuse non-experts.
If one looks first at the wholesale price, you're right that - in general - one would expect it to 'spike' when the gas prices shoot up. But on days when wind is dominant this has a minimal effect on retail prices, because the extra money paid to the wind farms (everybody gets the clearing price) is exactly offset by a reduction in the CfD payment. To repeat: consumers pay the same (high) price for most wind-generated electricity irrespective of the gas price.
So the interesting question, I think, is: what happens on days when the wind isn't blowing and gas generation is dominant? And here's the thing: if the price for gas-generated electricity (with carbon tax to account for the climate externality) is below the CfD strike prices, we're still ahead, even if it has spiked above its average. And because the CfD strike prices are so eye-wateringly high, this happens far more often than not.
Indeed, it was only for part of 2022 that the wholesale price was above the CfD prices and so the wind farms were paying money in to the system rather than taking out.
This chart from David Turver (who I learned a lot of this stuff from) is eye-opening in that regard: https://x.com/7Kiwi/status/2031657347433603581 (edited to provide clearer chart)
If the renewables fleet is supposed to be protecting us from gas price strikes, we're paying a VERY expensive premium for that insurance.
The key is factories ideally are mobile. Follow the winds. Come online and go offline when the wind blows. Use as much free energy as possible to hit yearly production targets and then take the rest of the year off.
What company are you with for that tariff? Do you have solar panels or something?
> Britain paying highest electricity prices in the world for second year running
> Ed Miliband’s net zero targets are facing fresh scrutiny after Britain was found to be paying the highest electricity prices in the developed world.
> New data published on Tuesday showed the price paid by UK industry for power was 63pc higher than in France and 27pc higher than in Germany.
> Britain is also the second-most expensive country in the world for household electricity, with billpayers paying twice as much as those in the US.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/britain-paying-highest-e...
Yes. But these things can be orthogonal. Or actually brcause gas is expensive.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro
The price for wholesale electricity is set by a bidding process, with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce a unit of electricity.
Once built, the cost of generating power from renewables is very low, so these typically come in with the cheapest bid. Nuclear might come next.
Gas generators often have the highest costs, because they have to buy gas to burn, as well as paying a "carbon price" - a charge for emissions.
The wholesale cost is set by the last unit of electricity needed to meet demand from consumers. This means that even if gas only generates 1% of power at a given time, gas will still set the wholesale price.
> Or actually brcause gas is expensive.
Gas in the UK is expensive because the Tories spent decades selling off the storage so developers could turn them into real estate. This continued well into the 2000's when, for example the lettuce (Truss) closed the Rough storage facility in 2017.
Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation. Another one of the Tory's great ideas. The UK privitisation model is designed to generate profit. Norway made a different choice. Equinor is majority state-owned, and Norwegian extraction operates within a framework designed to capture resource rents for public benefit. Britain privatised its way out of that option decades ago in the Thatcher-era and has never seriously revisited it.
Analysis from the University of Oxford[1] found that maximising oil and gas extraction from the North Sea would only save households £16 to £82 per year – and this would rely on tax revenues collected being distributed to households to offset their energy bills.
Dr Anupam Sen, co-author of the analysis, said the idea that “draining” the North Sea would make the UK more energy secure and significantly cut household bills is “sheer fantasy”. “We show that regardless of the remaining lifetime of North Sea oil and gas, a ‘drill baby drill’ approach to extraction would actually cost households more money versus continuing on our path to clean energy.”
The authors stress that savings gained from the clean energy transition are recurring annual reductions in bills which would continue indefinitely, whereas North Sea oil and gas are finite resources that would run out around 2040.
[1] https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/drill-baby-drill-appro...
Exactly, and the Tories banned onshore wind, and refused to really invest in offshore wind. We've got the North Sea and its perfect for wind farms we should have had for decades
They didn't refuse to invest in offshore wind. Tories were the ones who started this ball rolling in the mid-2010s by breaknecking the removal of non-renewable energy production without any clear plan.
The issue with offshore wind is that it isn't always windy. If you look at modelling with energy system with a high proportion of offshore wind, you need other sources of energy which often isn't factored into the economic return of the original investment.
We are doing this because, for some reason, we have decided there is political capital in paying out these huge subsidies to large companies to produce expensive energy. I would think that would be obvious when the UK has extremely high electricity prices and renewable production is very high...where do you think the money is going? It is going to subsidise inefficient and expensive supply.
Also, one of the primary issues with the UK is that the political system heavily incentivizes people to blame "the other side" for these issues. The Tories were extremely aggressive in moving towards green energy but people who vote for Labour, because they support green energy, will have to believe the opposite. There are other posts on this chain that also blame the Tories for things that didn't happen. In this system, it is very hard for anything good to happen and is how you end up with someone like Starmer who appears to have almost no opinions on anything other than staying in power and keeping the gravy train going for the lads. Not serious. Expect things to get significantly worse.
Our electricity prices are much higher than anywhere else. I remember reading research last year that the cost of government intervention in so high that if gas prices tapered to zero, electricity prices would not fall. It is going to get much, much, much worse.
Labour and the Conservatives are no different from each other. The Tories back then expected the "free market" to take care of everything. And that "free market" has clearly failed British people given where we are. They were "extremely aggressive" in their words (like BoJo back in 2020) but really extremely passive in their actions. Britain really needs grid-scale energy storage to make renewables work and that is its own big challenge.
> grid-scale energy storage
This is currently called natural gas. You store it in the ground, and in "day tanks" on land connected to pipes.
Nuclear can also be seen in the same way in relation to renewables.
Batteries are currently much further than I ever thought possible, but still nowhere close to being cost effective enough for most areas.
If you forced every solar or wind installation to have at least 48 hours of nameplate capacity in storage, you would get closer to the true cost of deploying renewables. Right now there is a whole lot of cherry picking going on, where investors are taking the profitable easy stuff, collecting subsidies, and then making the hard expensive stuff someone else's problem.
Right now battery deployments cover the few hour duck curve at best, because that's the only profitable way to deploy them. Hopefully the trend continues though!
Come on bro...next election, it will be different this time.
Tories do not back the free market. You said it yourself, the two parties are the same. Elections are irrelevant, both political parties pander towards orthogonal groups of voters, they tell them they are different, and they get in government and will do the same thing. Reform will do the same thing.
Also, the characterisation of what the government is able to do is extremely inconsistent. Able to lock down the whole country by fiat? Happened in an afternoon. Able to approve a 2-bed house twenty miles away from anyone? Sorry mate, need 26 forms, planning authority, need solar panels, need heat pump, etc. One of the big issues the UK has is with the understanding of government, it is the most bizarre mix of extreme libertarianism and extreme authoritarianism. It is a country where police will arrest someone from criticising a politician or the police AND a country where the police are unable to investigate almost all crimes (fraud investigations are outsourced to banks and private companies but there is action at multiple layers of government to control what happens on Twitter).
Storage is not possible. Everyone knows this. What game is being played here? Which other medium-sized country has large amounts of renewables with as much storage as we require. Electricity prices are already ruinously expensive. The solution is simple: do the stuff that works, that is it. The UK is a tale in being unable to do simple things that work.
"Storage is not possible"
Interestingly, the reality is that the "free market" is making this happen and its already here. 'The UK grid-scale battery storage market grew 45% by operational capacity in 2025, with 4GWh coming online during the year, bringing total operational capacity to 12.9GWh.'
Link: https://www.energy-storage.news/another-record-breaking-year...
Congrats you have storage for about twenty minutes of national consumption. Rough had 9 days and was basically just a hole in the ground in the sea, rather than the manically expensive battery storage which involve massive levels of corruption and legal battles to get started. Genius.
Again, this is the issue. People suggesting that stuff that makes no obviously no sense for political or social reasons. Why? This is a very simple problem too, but there is massive political pressure to find solutions which produce more corruption.
Last I read the strike price for offshore wind was about half of that for nuclear power (Hinkley Point). In other words the "huge subsidies" aren't going to who you think they are.
You don't understand what a subsidy is. Offshore wind subsidies are taken out of electricity bills, not the price. The price you are seeing does not include the subsidy.
The reason why Hinkley Point is expensive is completely solvable. The reason why it is expensive is because it is supposed to be expensive, that is the purpose. An A road near me has required two lanes, so far they have spent near £100m over twenty years and have not built anything. The basic premise of the UK political system is that people have no idea what the price of anything should be because it is all a political fiction.
When the costing was done for Hinkley 10 years ago the price was going to be, iirc, something like 50% above the price of gas which was at record lows. This was regarded as extremely expensive...electricity prices are up multiples and multiples since then. Since then, you have had armies of lawyers, consultants, lobbyists, planners working on the project full-time...and you are asking why it is expensive? Thinking this requires knowing so little about how much nuclear costs around the world and having literally zero idea about infra projects work in the UK (spoiler: there is massive corruption at almost every level, tens of billions in graft every year).
Hinckley Point C has a Contract for Difference that basically means they know what they will be paid in advance.
Any savings they make constructing or overruns don't affect that.
So if anyone is grifting they are grifting the French taxpayer via EDF.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/16/edf-hinkley-...
Yes, offshore wind has CFDs too. If you are building an offshore wind farm, you are spending lots of money to construct something that isn't a low-cost operator and will likely cause significant economic issues with customer's ability to pay you...therefore, CFD. This is how the government was able to intervene to cause non-economic outcomes.
And yes, as I explain above but which you seem to have not read...there was unbelievable levels of graft involved with Hinkley. EDF is not the victim, the reason why the CFD is there is to pay suppliers to EDF which are: lawyers, consultants, planners, etc. At some point, someone may get paid for building a nuclear power plant but that is a largely accidental outcome. If you compare to what other countries with functioning political systems, Korea for example, it is multiples. The costs and prices are so ludicrous, so out of control that no-one could think they make economic sense...and, of course, they don't. It is just corruption.
Non CfD offshore wind farms probably can be economical without CfD if they had access to very cheap capital. But without CfD the risk is higher and so is the profit margin on the debt which ultimately makes it more expensive to generate the electricity which in turns increases risk of low wholesale prices.
Also, for years CfD rates were actually lower than wholesale price and are currently generating at lower strike prices than average wholesale prices. The problem now is more inflation, capital costs, and commodity prices for materials. But then a lot of other things are more expensive also.
General question because I'm ignorant of UK internal politics: are the Isles' energy prices just generally higher? There aren't any large sources of fossil fuels or natural gas that aren't offshore, right? And the coal got significantly used up by hundreds upon hundreds of years of mining.
I'm wondering if really, the causality is reversed: it's not that the renewables make energy expensive in the UK, it's that energy is expensive in the UK, which incentivized construction of a lot of renewables, because they're an overall cheaper source of energy long-term since you don't have to either pay your neighbors to import them or build rigs in the saltwater ocean?
Yes, there are massive onshore reserves. The Tory government that has been accused on here of pimping the environment immediately banned all exploration.
There is are also two relatively big offshore fields that were taken to a very late stage of development and then stopped because of opposition by local government.
I would research exactly how big the gap is with other countries (and, remember, retail price is subsidised). The Cameron government made the active decision to order companies to shut down power plants with no plans for replacement. To be clear, nothing about energy...this is jut electricity provision. There was no economic incentive, that is why tens of billions were given to energy companies to produce non-economic, expensive power with guaranteed payments.
There was some research done last year iirc: if the UK paid zero for gas, the price of electricity would not stop rising because of the government intervention.
It is reasonable that you assume something rational must be going on here. But that model does not apply in the UK. Politics took over from economics a long time ago.
There aren’t massive untapped offshore reserves… the North Sea is a mature basin
The Tories granted a hundred plus drilling licenses and so far they’ve yielded a months worth of gas supply
There are still large untapped known fields in the North Sea within UK waters adjacent to the same that Norway are still profitably using. There is also vast swathes of UK waters that are unexplored, and are currently artificially expensive to do so due to UK taxation on fossil fuel companies.
The price of petrol at the pump is at least 50% Government direct tax - fuel duty, VAT (which multiplies the duty value - very cheeky). Then the other parts - wholesale price, retailer profit, delivery costs, have their tax implicitly priced into that. That probably makes the overall Government take something like 70% of the price you pay.
As for coal, there's apparently about 600 million tons of accessible usable coal left, which at current UK usage is good for quite a few decades if not more.
The current government is banning wind turbines factories and billions of Pounds in investments because "China". It is too easy to blame the previous government(s) when the current one has no strategic thinking or plan, either.
The previous government was in power for 14 straight years. The current (useless) government only came into power in July 2024. Yes, I think the previous government should have some of the blame. Just to add, wind turbine factory investments have failed for a few other reasons too. One local to me fell through because it was no longer economically viable (local competition, low margin, and of course cheap imports)
Chinese company Ming Yang was planning to invest 1+ billion to build a factory in Scotland. They were going to be the local competition. UK government has just officially refused to approve it. This is a government decision based on politics and lobbying from other interests (US gov and EU competitors) and yet another U-turn for the government (as apparently gov was initially keen...).
I don't want a Chinese company to own 1 billion pounds of energy infrastructure in Scotland.
couldnt you do the same thing china does? force them to have a local partner that ends up owning it?
Because?...
This would have been a factory to produce wind turbines, which would have benefited the country. And I thought net-zero was a priority.
Essentially all solar panels are made in China. All our car factories are foreign-owned, and even nuclear power plants are.
Because? I just said. I'd rather _China_ don't own 1 billion pounds of our country's energy infrastructure. Are you being coy or are you seriously that naive? Utterly perplexed you need more of an explanation.
And all those things you mentioned. I'd rather they were all home-grown but I can live with the French having a chunk of our Nuclear - because I like the French.
High prices and maximum rent extraction is the plan. Same plan as the Tories and everyone else who gets close to power.
What's the point that incompetence flips over to malice?
Why would additional storage make a significant difference to the price of gas?
Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy.
> Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy.
I will give credit to the person who got there before me. :)
Smoothing out price volatility is a big one.
But also it gives you options:
You can buy it "today" when its cheap and store it for when you need it (e.g. winter months).
You can also trade on that basis too. For example you can make a future-dated commitment to buy gas (knowing you have the storage available to take delivery). But if the situation changes and you later find you don't need it, you can sell that contract to someone else (or you can still take delivery and re-sell it). But you can't do any of that without having the ability to take delivery, because the person who sold you that future-dated contract will want both your money and to get the gas they sold you off their hands.
Because if you have enough renewables and storage to eliminate gas from the mix you are no longer paying gas prices. The more often that happens, the cheaper your bills get.
The study you have linked is completely wrong.
There is no international market for gas because export/import is physically complex. This is why gas is priced very differently despite it being chemically similar (unlike oil). Anyone who says anything different should be immediately disregarded as someone who should not have an opinion.
This is technically true for oil but there are two other factors. One, importing oil is environmentally-intensive and relies upon the assumption of free and open trade in oil...hopefully, the last few weeks have demonstrated why this is untrue. Two, the assumption is that mix of imports is not changing, because of high energy costs and reduction in North Sea production, UK refineries are shutting down so we are completely losing domestic capacity across the whole space. We aren't importing oil, we are importing refined products, losing domestic chemicals capacity, losing margin. Lower jobs, lower tax revenues, more reliance on imports.
The above take would be somewhat funny if we weren't ten years into seeing the consequences of this. At this point, we could be back to the stone age and you would have the same people screeching that inventing fire is dangerous (I worked in equity research in the mid-2010s...I remember when Cameron was really pushing hard for this, Clegg was saying how expensive nuclear is, etc. people in the industry were saying this would very badly...the issue is that the political cycle is far shorter than the economic cycle, all of this stuff is obvious but people in the UK run on the political cycle so if it isn't the newspapers, no-one normal reads them, next week then it will never happen...same issue with housing, exactly the same thing happened, we are now subsidising retail electricity which is impossible to get out of, I remember specifically this idea was thought of as an insane impossibility but producers were saying it would have to happen, and giving huge subsidies to producers...this is all obvious, obvious things happening are obvious, producers were fine, they get paid the subsidies but consumers are getting shafted AND consistently voting to get shafted).
Also, Roughs storage facility is in the sea...so I am not sure what "real estate" development was done here (the UK has been building 10-20% of the required growth in housing stock for something like two decades...again, the same people will be screeching about developers if we lived in caves). The reason it was closed was due to economics.
For some reason, you deny that producing more gas would be useful but are outraged at a storage facility closing when the primary function of a storage facility is to allow energy producers to arb derivatives markets effectively. I have no idea how this makes sense to you based on all of the above...perhaps you just want to complain about the Tories? I have no idea.
The current tax rate on North Sea production is 75%, there was ample opportunity for public benefit but multiple governments took that money and spent it on benefits. The reason why Norway has worked is because they incentivized exploration (again, something that you imply later would have no benefit...but okay). The policy of the last fifteen years has been to tax the industry heavily and disincentivize exploration. Revisiting this approach is extremely unpopular amongst all politicians which is why production has dropped. Even with this limitation, we have large gas fields that have been blocked (by the Tories btw) for environmental reasons.
This isn't complicated: if you want more oil and gas, produce it and create more incentives to produce it. The reality is that people want to have their cake and eat it: North Sea production is both very pointless but paying huge amounts of carbon to import from the Middle East is a good idea and we have to pay subsidies of 30-40% electricity bills to subsidies green production...which is also very profitable but requires subsidies because of Tory developers or something.
The UK isn't a serious country. What is happening to the UK is a reflection of phenomenally poor political leadership. It is deserved.
> paying huge amounts of carbon to import from the Middle East is a good idea
You are wrong here.
UK oil has a very high carbon footprint.
British North Sea oil is sour (high in sulphur). It is the "wrong" type of oil for UK refineries. So it gets sent to other countries around the world for refining.
UK oil is viscous, waxy, crude which needs to be heated to pipe it. This means it takes a lot of energy to pipe (hello carbon footprint !) and it is not compatible with UK refineries anyway, so it has to be moved overseas (hello carbon footprint !!).
UK crude is nothing like Norwegian crude and massively different from the stuff drilled in the Middle East which requires barely any refining in comparison.
Brent crude is a light, sweet oil. UK oil is extracted from same oilfields as Norways - little difference in quality - and the major extraction from both is Brent crude
A handy explainer on Brent quality is here: https://kimray.com/training/types-crude-oil-heavy-vs-light-s...
> Brent crude is a light, sweet oil.
Brent is yesterday's story....
All the oil that would come from the prospective fields if extra drilling were to be permitted would absolutely be the heavy, viscous, waxy stuff.
I am going to have to ask you for a source this time.
So why not refine it in the UK?
> So why not refine it in the UK?
I already gave the answer in my original post.... UK crude is the wrong type of oil for UK refineries.
Almost all UK refineries were built back in the day (late 60's/early 70's), before North Sea, when the UK was mostly importing oil from Libya and elsewhere in that region.
All the stuff from Libya and elsewhere is far removed from the viscous, waxy sludge that emerges from the North Sea. It requires a far less intensive refining process.
So if your refinery has been built for a low-intensity process you can't just bolt on the shit-ton of high-energy stuff required for waxy crude.
It isn't the wrong type of crude. Forties pipeline was directly connected to a refinery. That refinery is now shutting down because of high energy costs, high general costs of doing business, and the investment outlook for UK North Sea.
The solution even if this wasn't true is also simple: build more refineries. This is all within our control.
You also said above it takes "energy" to pipe...do you have no understanding of physics? How do you think stuff moves in a pipe. Dear God.
You also said above that Norwegian crude is different...it is not. Brent is a crude blend that includes UK and Norwegian crudes. The chemical differences are relatively small, Norwegian refineries import UK crude (I am using UK crude because, for some reason, you seem to think that is something exists in the real world...it is just Brent).
One of the most confidently wrong posts I have seen on here...and that is after you said that an offshore gas field was given over to real estate development. Lol.
You should consider a career in the Civil Service. You will fit in well.
Grangemouth has been precarious for years and has received tens of millions in public subsidies
High electricity prices aren’t really a thing for oil refineries as they’re capable of generating their own as Valero Pembroke does
That begs the question why aren't we building refineries that can process our own oil without having to ship it abroad for processing.
> That begs the question why aren't we building refineries that can process our own oil
Putting aside the legal and "public appetite" aspects that someone else already mentioned, it all comes back to privitisation in the end.
Given that the extraction was privitised, clearly market theory dictates that you cannot then interfere with where the extracted oil goes.
So if a private company is deciding on refining then it will follow the path of most profit, i.e. build/expand vs use existing capacity elsewhere. Given that most oil companies are large multinationals they will likely also prioritise using their own facilities vs paying a third-party refinery.
And clearly at the time, carbon footprint was not on the agenda of the private companies, either directly or enforced via legislation.
The writing is on the wall that people, especially young people, don't want to be using fossil fuels anymore.
Refineries are expensive (like $10B for country scale) and take years to build.
Which begs the question, how much renewable energy can you get for $10B? And perhaps even faster?
But it's not that clear, because reality has these fractal trade offs and the future is typically pretty opaque. So then will/motivation because an issue too.
Most likely the legal and public relations costs of building it are predicted to be more than shipping it somewhere else and back.
I ask the same question about why Canada sends most of it's oil to the US to be refined. The answer is usually the government doesn't allow it and/or no one wants to take a private capital risk in the economic environment.
> There is no international market for gas because export/import is physically complex
I live in Australia and I assure you there is a huge international market for gas. It's one of Australia's major exports.
Also in Europe the Russian sourcing of gas is a major strategic factor in energy policy.
Is gas expensive though? It's like 6p per kWh at the moment with electricity about 25p per kWh for consumers.
I think gas is dirt cheap, heating your home and hot water with electricity is 4x more expensive and costs hundreds a month.
It’s only x4 more expensive to use electricity with old methods like immersion / resistance heaters
Heat pumps are 400% efficient or more, so have parity or better with gas prices
Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications.
https://www.irena.org/Innovation-landscape-for-smart-electri...
With electric resistance heating you can gen very high temperatures, but with less than 100% efficiency. With electric arc heating you can melt steel, but again less than 100% efficient.
> Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications.
They do if you start from ambient temperature, but they can be more effective if they are pumping heat out of the waste heat stream of a process. This requires different working fluids than lower temperature systems, though.
Most industrial heat energy is not consumed at very high temperature. IIRC, 2/3rds is at less than 300 C.
Electric resistance heating might also allow PV to dispense with auxiliary equipment, like inverters, so even if inefficient that might not matter as much. Heat also allows easy long duration storage at scale, even at rather high temperature, so resistive heating can be used with intermittently available cheap surplus power.
For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient. This process is accounting for 1–2% of global energy consumption, 3% of global carbon emissions, and 3% to 5% of natural gas consumption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Heating storage (also cold storage) in industrial applications is possible and is done, but in many cases you are limited by allowed temperature range of chemical/physical processes. For example you are limited on the lower side by melting temperature of material and on higher side by high temperature corrosion.
Cold storage for electric demand response https://www.enersponse.com/cold-storage
In cement industries models have been developed to flatten the grid's hourly demand curve by minimizing the industrial customer's hourly peak loads and maximizing the shifting of demand to off-peak periods.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
> For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient.
I should note that this process doesn't require external heat input (except at startup). The reaction is exothermic and the excess heat is used to make steam that either is used to make power or to provide steam to other processes. It does require pressurization, but that's an input of work, not heat.
It would be nice if the process could be run at lower temperature, but we just don't have the catalysts for that.
> Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Electric resistance heat is very storable and can provide heat 24/7, possibly even 24/7/365 at high latitude with PV.
That's cool but who is going to pay the upfront cost for the heat pumps? The sources I could find say we currently have 412 heat pumps per 100k people in the UK.
Ordinary people can't just afford to drop 10k for a heat pump + installation for it to pay for itself 20 years down the line.
You have to include the costs of conversion - gas power plant. Also you have some some losses during conversion from heat to electricity, a modern gas power plant can be up to 60% efficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant
Then you have electric distribution costs (costs for building and maintenance of electric grid, transformers, power lines).
In many industrial process heat applications direct burning of gas is preferred, because it lowers the costs.
> Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation
Post privatization domestic gas production rose 900%. Increasing supply = cheaper prices. Prices were low and stable at the time compared to today:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
This claim is the sort of dangerous ideological nonsense that is so common in Britain, and which has wrecked it. Literally every time socialist policies fail people come out of the woodwork to blame privatization, and yet invariably this made things better despite an often botched process. The American oil/gas industry is fully private and yet they have much cheaper energy: blaming Thatcher is dumb and not the answer.
Gas in the UK is expensive because successive British governments wanted to have nothing to do with it and did everything they could to crush the suppliers. They thought deliberately deindustrializing the country was moral and ethical, for "climate" reasons. So they:
• Imposed massive "windfall" taxes on the industry to the extent that nobody developed new sources
• Then imposed very high carbon prices on it
• Banned fracking
• Stopped issuing licenses for exploration
• Imposed price caps
• Chased all the industry that needed cheap energy away to Asia
• Shut down gas storage facilities, exposing Britain to the global spot price
• Didn't build other reliable energy sources like nuclear or coal
End result: high prices and shortages. There are graphs here that show how much of the British electricity price is artificially created by government:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/why-is-my-energy-bill-so-...
Other countries didn't make all these mistakes together. And they were mistakes by the government. Really, can you even claim the British energy industry is private when the government takes 80%+ of its profits? Socialist policies always create shortages and high prices. Always.
The UK (and Europe) could produce much more gas and consequently control prices if they wanted. It is easy to always blame the previous government(s) but the current situation is policy across Western Europe.
Edit: puzzled by the blunt downvotes for stating a noncontroversial fact. Over the last 15 years the US has invested in shale gas while the UK and EU have banned it. Even today the UK refuses expension of North Sea gas extraction. Whatever the reasons (environment, decarbonisation) it does mean that the situation we have now with gas across Western Europe is policy, not an unfortunate consequence of world events...
It takes time though and it's hard to anticipate geopolitical shocks like the war in Ukraine and Iran.
> Iran
To be fair, I think you would be hard pushed to find anyone outside Israel who seriously thought Iran would ever be on the cards.
Netanyahu dedicated 40 years of his life going to various US presidents trying to get their buy-in. The US presidents all clearly listened to what their advisors had to say regarding Hormuz etc. and said "Thanks, but no thanks" to Netanyahu. Then Trump came along who was ready to over-rule his advisors and surrounded himself with yes-men in his cabinet.
I'm not being political here. A lot of it is public, for example just go to YouTube and look up the decades of videos of Netanyahu visiting the UN or US repeating the same line about "Iran being weeks away from a bomb", almost word-for-word for the last 40 years.
I don't think Trump particularily cares himself. But he's surrounded by weird religious cult who all think that attacking Iran and bringing in war in the middle east will bring on the end times and second coming of jesus christ. I honestly wish this was just a facade for attaining political power, but these nutjobs seem completely earnest in their beliefs.
Combining those god awful beliefs with a set of advisors with room temperature IQs (and I'm in canada where we use metric temps) results in a true inability to forsee any of these issues in advance. Real shame, I can only hope it drives your populace to finally do something about it, but I won't hold my breath.
No, this has nothing to do with either. It is policy in the UK and EU not to produce gas on environmental and decarbonisation grounds, and so in fact high priced are policy.
California is a great example; highest electricity prices in the US (not counting Hawaii, which makes sense) despite significant hydro and fantastic solar capacity. In the last few years California runs 100% renewable on many days (and growing) every year.
Economics 101: prices are not set by what goods cost to create + markup. Prices are set by how much people are willing to pay.
Why is it "people are willing to pay" and not "corporations are brazen enough to charge"? These utilities are necessities and relatively few people have access to cheaper alternatives to them.
The regulations mandate that the market operates that way. It's the government that should be held to account.
Because, under usual circumstances, self-interested corporations compete against each other to get as close to what people are willing to pay for energy as possible.
> compete against each other
Citation needed.
https://lmgt.org/?q=econ+101
There’s a reason most universities don’t hand you a bachelors degree in economics as soon as you complete EC101. You should look into EC102 and the rest of the curriculum.
Because PG&E is a for-profit company. They are supposed to charge what the market will bear.
Unfortunately since PG&E is a regulated utility it's not that simple.
When you compare PG&E's electricity rates to the rest of the nation (and neighbors like SMUD), you can see that the CPUC isn't doing much.
PG&E's prices are not a function of what people will pay though, it's a function of what people expect.
CA wants green energy now (aggressive targets), needs to have fire hardened infrastructure (expensive upgrades), and wants full service to sprawling remote areas using modern infrastructure.
The combination of these is incredibly expensive.
If you don't believe me, buy PGE stock and get your dividend from their "greed". But honestly, the stock is an awful performer, because the actual problems facing them are real.
I know nothing about California so please correct me if I'm wrong.
You mention significant hydro and solar capacity in California. So minimal carbon externality: lung disease and climate change. If you consider that externalised cost into the cost of electricity elsewhere, does not California and other renewable-rich electric grids fare more competitive on price?
E.g. the problem is not the expensive renewables in California, rather, the problem is that the cost of declining human and animal health and climate change is externalised for the fossil fuel.
> In the last few years California runs 100% renewable on many days (and growing) every year.
How many is "many days"? Gas is still used for at least one fifth of electricity. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/5y/mont...
According to the official tracker (https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/clean-energy-serving-... and elsewhere) there were 279 days in 2025 where California was on 100% renewable for _some_ time during the day (could be hours, could be minutes at mid-day).
In total hours equivalent of 77.3 full days over 2025.
Meaning it's supply. Overall dupply low because fossil fuels discouraged and penalized, demand high, price high.
You could solve that with a stroke of a pen, by re-nationalizing.
California has high volumetric rates, but mostly that is because it has much more distributed generation than any other state, uses far less grid power, so the grid rates are dominated by fixed grid costs. Actual monthly electric bills in California are not remarkable at all. According to the EIA the typical residential electric bill in California is almost exactly the same as Texas: $174.59 vs. $173.94.
Yeah I'm in the UK and for electricity, I'm on the green Octopus Agile tariff, which tracks the wholesale price updating every 30 mins. Given the abundant green energy today, and peak times between 3-7pm, right this second I'm paying £0.02/kWh, but at 6pm, I'll be charged £0.40/kWh. In the coming months with gas supply reduced, and consumer demand steady, it will have a knock on impact to me given it tracks wholesale cost so I'll have to consider moving off the tariff given I'll be paying more overall.
This is absolutely correct. HN readers can learn more about the merit order and marginal pricing here: https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/what-does-merit-or...
You can read more about gas markets in the Global Gas Market guide by A115 here: https://a115.co.uk/global-gas-market/ (you can download the PDF guide at the bottom without giving any information)
I've read this before and I don't understand how this doesn't become/is untenable.
Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
Also, this would mean that in order to really bring the price down, gas needs to be taken out as a source. But gas is typically the source that balances the grid because its output can be changed quickly. So price wise, you might get a drop but you would lose your ability to react quickly to fluctuations in demand
> Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
I used to work in wind energy in the Netherlands, it is only profitable there due to government subsidies. It was/is an enormously complicated system to understand on the whole. I was on the environmental impact side (visualizations) during the permitting process. It's high-risk & enormously expensive during the permitting process (i.e. getting permission to build the wind farm), and beyond that I understand it's a bidding process and again, super complicated on the energy trading side once you're operating. My experience was that the wind farm operators seemed to be doing well financially, but insanely lucrative? I'm not sure about that vs. non-renewables. Everyone I worked with (including myself) believed in green energy as a part of a larger mission to make the world a slightly better place. EU directives on renewables is what pushed the mission forward; the dutch on the whole (surprisingly), do not love wind turbines in their back yard.
:-( I'm sitting here looking at huge wind turbines out my front window and I absolutely LOVE them. I get to live in a solarpunk future where I can get where I need to without a car, my kids run out the door and play without getting run over, and I can see clean energy being made for my home (and that of my neighbours).
I'm sure a lot of the cranky old people near me don't like them, but they hate everything and go out of their way to find things to complain about, to be honest.
Frankly I feel the same as you. I saw my first wind turbine in Newcastle Australia and was completely blown away & wanted to work in wind energy. I've been to Denmark and seen the Vestas V-164 offshore turbine at the on-shore test facility. The rotor area on the V-164 seems as big as a football field - it's the largest rotating object I've ever seen and my mind could barely understand the scale of it. For me, wind turbines are beautiful. I was called crazy a lot in the Netherlands ;-)
Ah, they’re grumpy by nature, I wouldn’t worry about it too much :-)
With the bike lanes, public transport, solar panels, and wind turbines, it even beats that problematic yogurt commercial…
I wondered what the ratio of traditional windmills to modern turbines is, and the answer is about 36. https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-does-the-...
Maybe you should build them 36 traditional windmills instead. Or, like, 9 traditional-looking giant ones.
In terms of public acceptance, you're probably right. The Dutch in my experience love the old windmills, but modern wind turbines are in a different league in terms of harvesting the power of wind efficiently. Blade design is comparable to the aircraft wing design (seriously complex engineering).
In my post above I talked about seeing the Vestas V164 in person, but I've also been on top of the tallest wind turbine in NL (manufactured by Lagerwey). The higher the nacelle and the larger the rotor diameter equal more power generation (the higher you go the more wind you'll find), but public acceptance has a lot to do with things.
I've seen in person how the Dutch can lose their mind over wind projects, I was in Drenthe in 2014 at a public engagement night (where the public sees visualizations of the turbines, and learns how they can benefit and so on...). At Drenethe there were hundreds of locals protesting, cops, drama. Super scary. I was involved on the public acceptance side of things and have come face to face with countless thousands of scared and angry people. I can't imagine what selling a HUGE turbine for their backyard might be like, but going back to your original idea - selling a classic looking windmill would likely be very easy. The tradeoff is that classic windmill would likely generate a negligible amount of energy in comparison. But cool idea anyhow ;-)
I don't think that's true. For one because the size is what makes it efficient/worth it. Second, the old windmills have all been there forever, so no one complains because they don't know any better.
Keep in mind that a typical windmill and a wind turbine are very different in size. Some people are afraid of noise, or shade. Especially if your home will be shaded by the blades, I could see that being an issue as you have flickering light all the time.
Renewables (and nuclear) have high up front costs and comparitively low marginal cost. Comparing it against something that burns expensive fuel can be misleading (if you want it to be).
One system is taking the money and turning round and handing it to their fuel suppliers, the other is turning round and handing it to the people who loaned them money to build a giant complex structure that would take a decade or more of risk and uncertainty to pay itself back.
Gas bids high because it literally makes no business sense for them to operate for less than the gas input costs. They'd rather sit it out when electricity prices are lower. Renewables will take almost any price once built because wind and sun is free, but won't build in the first place without a path to paying off their investment over a certain timespan.
(This is why more solar has been built in places with good low risk finance than where the sunlight resource is strongest)
CfDs are a competitive bidding process and so give a market price for what developers need their price to be over 15 years or more for it to make a standard return on investment. Developers outside this process need to guess what electricity prices will be, at the times they generate for years to come.
Yes, and I think that’s actually intentional, they’re rewarding renewables way over the odds without needing to give politically controversial benefits. The rewards are just an inherent result of the existing system. This is why renewables are growing rapidly in the uk.
Of course we’ll need a way to resolve fluctuations both rapid and slower. Rapid fluctuations are handled by pumped hydro and increasingly by batteries.
The slow fluctuations (day/night all the way to summer/winter and good/bad weather patterns) are much trickier, I think it’s still unclear how well handle them, but it will certainly be partly handled by having an excess of renewables, though we’ll likely need some other solutions too, nuclear is probably one of them.
The irony is that your comment should be entirely inverted. Renewables are not rewarded way over the odds - in fact the ruling party banned onshore wind entirely and i remember them banning at least one offshore wind farm. Luckily it is very cheap to build.
Now Hinkley Point C is another story. It's a hugely expensive boondoggle which is taking decades to construct at enormous cost and the reward at the end is that they are rewarded with a strike price that is 3x that of solar and wind. That is an obsecene subsidy forced on to customers for a power source that cant even do load following and doesnt help with fluctuations in supply and demand.
The slow fluctuations on cold, windless nights or when nuke plants are down for unplanned maintenance are going to be managed with gas.
Maybe one day it'll be gas synthesized with electricity from solar+wind overproduction on a day like today. The roundtrip is expensive, but will still be cheaper than nuclear power on a windy, summer day.
> Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
This is how markets are supposed to work. It provides an economic incentive for production to increase, which is what we want.
Consider what happens if you develop a farming method to produce potatoes for a fraction of the usual cost, but you can only meet 10% of total demand at your local market. What price are you going to sell your potatoes for when you show up to the market? You (like any free market seller) want to maximise your return, so you'll be able to sell for a fraction under the previous market rate, undercutting everyone else. Your farming method would be extremely lucrative.
Sure, but those same free markets will happily see those expensive producers go out of business. In the electricity scenario, that would mean blackouts.
If you triple the price, you don't have a new gas plant appear out of thin air. And the result won't really be lower consumption either, because most people would have fixed rate contracts (not in the UK so don't know specifically, but this is very common elsewhere)
> Sure, but those same free markets will happily see those expensive producers go out of business.
No, because remember you are only able to meet 10% of market demand. The expensive producers will still get 90% of the business, and the market price for their product will remain basically the same. This is what we observe in the electricity markets today: the price to us is the cost of the most expensive product. The cheaper producers who cannot meet the full market demand still get to sell at the cost of the most expensive product.
> The cheaper producers who cannot meet the full market demand still get to sell at the cost of the most expensive product.
Which would mean it's super lucrative and your same laws of economics will tell you that that means they'll be building like crazy.
My while point was that as soon as you get to a day where no gas is needed you've lost the ability to react quickly because no supplier will just leave a gas plant around just for that
Yes, but here’s the thing: you don’t have a monopoly over your potato farming method. Lots of new farms are built, and the more that do, the more the average price of a potato drops. Your expected return starts to drop. Yours - and everyone else’s - profit margins get squeezed.
Investors begin to refuse to build new potato farms because a return on their investment gets worse whenever anyone decides to build a new farm.
But the people need potatoes and more potato farms! The government issues an incentive scheme to guarantee a minimum price for each potato sold. Potential farm owners bid against each other for the lowest price, but it means they can build a farm and expect to break even.
> Investors begin to refuse to build new potato farms because a return on their investment gets worse whenever anyone decides to build a new farm.
If they all refuse, then they're leaving money on the table. One investor could invest in 10% production only, and that would be very lucrative. It would be exactly my low cost to produce potato scenario.
In practice, they don't all refuse, or all invest. The market finds a balance. In time, producers switch to the new method, because anybody who doesn't leaves an opportunity for someone else to take their business and make more money.
This takes time, though. If we want things to go quicker, then we need to guarantee return on investment for longer, which is exactly what the government does by guaranteeing prices to renewable energy producers.
Not only is it insanely lucrative, but the government enters into "contract for difference" contracts that guarantees a price per MWh that are generally above market rates, taking out most of the financial risk.
They aren't orthogonal - the reason that gas is being used is because renewable can't reliably power the grid! If you look at something like https://grid.iamkate.com/ you can see that in the last 24 hours the gas peak is when the wind dies down and the sun isn't shining, around 6-8pm. Happens to be a real price peak at that time. This isn't some weird and unexpected outcome, we've had at least a decade of evidence with this sort of low-wholesale-high-retail price dynamic.
That isn't gas is expensive, it is simply policy that the UK, rather naively, is trying to run their grid 24/7 based on processes that are not available 24/7. That is an expensive trick to try and pull off. Poor people need a way to signal that they won't use electricity in the evening if they want to be able to afford power is my read on the situation. Not very civilised but if that is how the UK approaches reliable cheap energy as a target then it seems the most reasonable outcome.
Unfortunately for the UK, its geology means there isn't a lot of pumped hydropower storage unlike France, which is the cheapest way to bank intermittent renewables. In the places where there is pumped hydro capacity like Coire Glas, the operators are demanding the government guarantee they would be paid today's (natural gas generated) price to go ahead with construction, which would completely defeat the purpose of energy storage.
And yes, letting nuclear power dwindle was a political choice, spurred by short termist bean-counter thinking:
http://www.stross.org.uk/charlie/old/rant/torness.html
Seems like a very good case to get storage and power backup in people's homes. Industrial users could install their own gas fired generators. Residential consumers could have simple battery based backup, or even a generator which would double for helping during powerouts.
Bigger question is why they haven't already - these trends have been in place for a very long time and this current phase of the UK energy crisis has been on display for years. Anything legal and cost effective would have been done by now if the market had anything to say about it. Which suggests something odd is afoot. Maybe storage is more expensive than gas, maybe the UK government has regulated the option out of existence. Maybe something else.
Probably because it doesn't make economic sense to install storage prior to renewables being so substantial that you start having to curtail.
Which, importantly, drives more renewables and storage development because it makes the renewables fantastically profitable to run: near zero cost for you, but paid the price set by gas.
Renewables may be the cheapest at spot values, but there needs to be a way to price in the intermittent nature of the power.
There is. The cost of my electricity changes every half hour.
People disliking renewables always say this.
Then when asked what method to price in the Swedish nuclear fleet having ~50% of capacity offline multiple times last year and France famously having 50% of the capacity offline during the energy crisis I always get crickets for answers.
It’s apparently fine when nuclear plants doesn’t deliver, but not renewables.
The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.
> The price for wholesale electricity is set by a bidding process, with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce a unit of electricity.
Without mentioning how Contracts for Difference (CfD) works, this is a slightly disingenuous oversimplification.
Well explained, thank you! This is called the marginal price. Many people are not aware of this and are then think renewables are expensive.
This is Telegraph for you. The cost of electricity is not driven by green levies or net zero targets, but by gas prices, as gas is a backstop when all other sources are exhausted. Therefore electricity prices are pretty much tied to gas.
Obviously, Electricity is a National Security issue. It's naive to state that the problem is gas prices. Germany is seeing Steel, Automotive, and other hard science companies leave for that very reason.
The strategy should have been to build an energy architecture that reduces prices while being robust against force majeure events.
Renewables inherently require gas peakers.
Electricity pricing in the UK is dictated largely by the price of Gas. This is a good video that goes into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEnFmrgEbWo
Gas is the yang to winds yin. What other dispatchable power source is there that Britain could use?
Whatever the dispatchable power source, it would have to last weeks at a time in the coldest months of the year.
The issue is that if my electricity I am using now is 99% renewable and 1% gas then I am paying as if 100% is gas. That is why prices are so high.
The video goes into much better detail but the keyword if you want to search yourself is "marginal cost pricing.
You can still have dispatchable gas without this pricing structure.
You can have dispatchable gas without that pricing structure, but having a grid without that pricing structure can't really function without major nationalization of power generation.
Marginal pricing is one of those things that at first sounds crazy, but when you delve into the topic, it's the only sensible way to have market pricing on electricity generation. The only real alternative would be a fully nationalized grid where the government buys up all the dispatachable power sources.
Do you have anything I can read on why marginal pricing is the only sensible way to have pricing?
EDIT: Ah, apparently it aligns market forces well, by making cheap energy sources massively profitable to run, so more and more get added.
Perversely, though, it seems to me that it also incentivizes an entire renewable grid to not expand to 100%, so they all enjoy a much higher price.
As long as there's a large variety of producers competing with eachother though, there's not really any good mechanism for them to collude to avoid expanding to 100%, especially when you add battery power providers and private persons with rooftop solar into the mix.
I think more likely than deciding to stop building more renewables, the renewable providers are just going be incentivized to start installing large batteries wherever they install renewable generation, so that they can flexibly decide if the current spot price is worth selling to the market, or whether it's better to just store the electricity that they generate so that they can sell it in 10 hours or whatever when the price is higher.
Which is great, because it creates a market pressure to build more storage, and at the most efficient place for that storage to be created (right next to where it's generated).
Hmm interesting, so it does seem like marginal pricing aligns incentives well.
I know less about the UK's electrical grid, but at least in Germany, if renewables plus batteries are enough to cover electricity needs for normal day-to-day weather, there is more than enough biogas production in the country to save and store that biogas for the weeks-at-a-time periods where renewable shortfalls happen and batteries won't be enough to cover it.
On any given day Germany generates 7-8% of its electricity from biogas, which means that if instead of burning that gas each day for electricity, we stored it in our network of gas reservoirs, then every 13 days of the year that we don't dip into those reserves, that's a full day of electricity generation in gas that's stored.
____
Even if this is done with fossil-gas instead of biogas though, simply having enough renewables + batteries to cut gas out of day-to-day electrical generation, and using it only for backup would be enough to drastically lower prices for the majority of the year.
This is of course linked to the UKs renewable rollout (and to do with detaips around the UKs energy markets leading to gas dictating the price for noe), but completely misses the fact that the UKs spending isn't just spending but investment.
Will be interesting to see in five years time looks like, we could well see a scenario where the UK has abundant cheap electricity being exported to the rest of Europe. Will be interesting to hear what the sceptics holding some American states fossil fuel based grids up as examples think then.
None of this of couse factors in the fact that fossil fuels cannot be sustained if we want a livable planet. Factoring that in, payimg energy bills three times as high would be a good investment, if it protects the world we depend on, in my book at least.
Ember has predictions of future EU cross border electricity flows in 2030 and 2040 and it shows the UK becoming a net exporter:
https://ember-energy.org/data/europe-electricity-interconnec...
Are you arguing causality? Texas generates significant renewables, and has low electricity prices.
Footing the technology development bills as a developed country should. Britain owes the world a lot in terms of fossil fuel contamination too.
> Ed Milliband's net zero targets...
These net zero targets were actually introduced by the right wing Conservative party in 2019 under Teresa May and passed with broad support across parties.
Now the same party has collapsed in support (for reasons unrelated to this target, which remains broadly popular with voters) and attacks the targets they introduced.
I'm sure there's an (un)healthy dose of degrowth to let them hit that 90% number too.
Economic rocket fuel lands in Dover most mornings, it'll balance out. - Ed Miliband 2026 (probably)
These titles are misleading, they always omit the rest of the grid and the final carbon footprint.
In March, the UK emitted 161g CO2/kWh. France did 6 times less CO2/kWh with 2x less renewables !
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/12mo/monthly
The title may be misleading, but IMO not for the reasons you mentioned. "90%" is based on generation right now, live. On the site from the post you can see that for the last day (24h) renewable generation was 66%, for the last week 46%, for the last year 42%. So it's nowhere near 90% renewable in general, but it is 90% at the moment (there's sunlight and good wind). Emissions on the website from the post are lower than on the website you linked - 107 g/kWh for the week, 124 for the year - but I don't know why that is.
Because nuclear. Which is a great 20th century French achievement !
If the EPR2 doesn’t spiral into costing £17.5bn per unit as the UK-PWR has, perhaps we can get them in to “rustle me up a nuclear power station” or two, in the words of Tony Blair.
https://youtu.be/Gq-l07XmQVc
Just needs a bit of "4be2be4be2be", we can do that!
The subsidies for the EPR2 fleet is a 10 euro cents per kWh CFD and interest free loans. With the first reactor coming online in 2038 at the earliest.
That sums up towards 20 cents per kWh in total.
It’s an absolutely horrifyingly expensive boondoggle before they have even started, and it won’t deliver any electricity in the relevant timeframes for electrifying industry and society.
On top of this EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for their existing paid off nuclear fleet. Let alone new builds.
And that is France which has been extremely protectionistic shielding their nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and even then its already leaking in on pure economics.
A 10c€/kWh CfD is not strictly speaking a subsidy, at the government will recover the average market price.
That being said, the total cost per kWh could well reach 20c/kWh, which is ridiculous. It's not only not competitive against renewables, but also not competitive with natural gas (CCGT are probably around 10-15c€/kWh).
The average day ahead price in France in 2025 was 6 cents per kWh.
This is with carbon trading starting to make fossil production very expensive, on top of LNG fossil gas. Which will quickly start to diminish as more renewables and storage comes online.
While the CFD runs for 40 years so into the 2080s for all but the first reactor.
France has an amazingly developed grid, with a lot of nuclear. But I think there's a risk of seeing grid make ups as "one size fits all". Norway and Sweden do well with huge amounts of hydro storage, but few countries have the geography for that level of hydro. Similarly, the UK has an abundance of offshore wind (especially in Scotland), so further developing that (rather than focusing heavily on nuclear because it works in France) is by no means a bad idea.
Hydro is great for long term storage, but the potential is too small and sparse on the globe to be a scalable solution.
France has much more nuclear. You can argue that is better but even if you agree it would take decades to get there.
South Korea builds nuclear power plants in five years.
Not any more they don't. Those were older reactor designs which nobody wants now. And the 5 years was first-pour to switch on. Add a few years for planning, permitting and actually supplying to the grid.
Newly approved Korean plans are aiming for 2038. Best of luck to them. I'm sceptical they'll make it.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/plans-for-two-ne...
Edit to add:
They used to be pretty fast but like everyone else seem to be slowing down significantly.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Thank you for the correction.
No worries, mate. It’s a super interesting topic!
That's only because that chart isn't bookkeeping nuclear as renewable, which is misleading at best.
Why would you classify nuclear as renewable? You can say it's clean energy but it's not renewable.
We've probably increased the amount of fissile material on earth. It's pretty renewable at that rate.
If you're talking about uranium enrichment, that's like saying we increased the amount of gasoline on earth (by refining crude oil). Natural uranium is ~99% non-fissile, and ~1% fissile, and we're only removing part of the non-fissile isotope to obtain 5% concentration of the fissile isotope. Uranium still needs to be mined, spent fuel can be partially recycled, but you need some new natural uranium input in the end. That said, non-renewability of uranium is a non-issue IMO, compared to the huge amounts of other non-renewable resources we're extracting.
The definition of renewable is a bit silly, wind and solar come from the sun's nuclear fusion.
Yet still it costs several pounds a day to heat your home in winter. People are going back to log burners. I've never seen so much coal/wood sold at the supermarkets during winter. I've got some electric blankets which is great but really energy costs seem to be spiralling.
This is great. Yes, plenty of challenges around this remain but the direction of travel is hugely positive.
Bit more advances in grid scale storage, bit more interconnects and this looks real good
Adapting to a fossil fuel free society damands to comply to some inconveniences, like to afford some days without or expensive electricity, to change the time of device use, even to be used to lower home temperatures. For me the most difficult part is to persuade my wife to comply. Fortunately I have solar/battery/netmetering and I only pay a small amount for the network use.
Can people in Britain post their actual electricity rates per kWh? I want us Californians to be able to see how badly we are (or aren’t) being ripped off by our utilities compared to you (mind you, these rates are approved by our regulator). We’re basically told we have to pay this much because of our lovely renewables requirements (they’re still far from 90% renewable though). We are on a ‘time of use’ rate designed for EV charging at night. We are paying 26 cents (£0.20) except for 4-9PM when it’s 59 cents (£0.44). Plus a monthly base charge which they just increased.
Those answers won't be too helpful. We have very high bills compared internationally, due to a difficult-to-explain quirk (pay-as-clear marginal pricing) where all electricity is charged to the customer at the highest rate possible at that moment. So wind may cost 0.05 pkwh and be freely available but if gas is being utilised anywhere else in the grid at a cost of eg. 0.45 then everybody gets charged 0.45 pkwh, even for the wind energy.
Its a messed up system which means often pay the highest in Europe, without even helping that much towards the tax coffers. But reform of this system does seem to be gaining a bit of political momentum.
The same system is used all over EU.
Most of the day 28p/kwh, 1-5am 17p/kwh, 4-7pm 39p/kwh.
The volumetric rate for electricity is almost totally irrelevant. California's bills are dominated by the fixed cost of the grid, and we use very little grid power compared to other states, so the volumetric rate has to be really high as a consequence. Electric power bills in California are in the middle of the pack compared to the other states, almost exactly the same as Texas and less than ten other states.
Volumetric rate is all that matters to normal consumers. It doesn’t matter where the costs come from or why. Only $/kwh.
No, the bottom line on the monthly bill is what matters.
Related - world-wide map of energy generation: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig...
Discussion (didn't seem to get much traction): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553165
There are grid scale batteries on the UK grid. Surely they’re being used.
One could work out what the discrepancy between consumption and production during the day to infer the battery discharge rate, but I don’t think there’s anything there…
There has been talk, seemingly power generation dispatch a year or so ago was do e by phoning up the power station and saying “More amperes please Mr Woodbine”.
My understanding is this is being written to an automatic system which isn’t fully commissioned.
Grid battery owners a few years go were irate that they weren’t in the offing to sell power. But that must be resolved by now, since so much money is being invested in it.
Unless that is for non-grid power supply.
This presentation suggests that BESS is used to keep the frequency stable, and remove huge price spikes:
https://cigre.org.uk/web-cont1001/uploads/Integrating-Grid-F...
This suggests that there is evidence for these sort of issues somewhere else on the web.
I mean negative prices should diminish if there are batteries to charge on it.
Today is abnormally windy in the north of the country, and sunny, so this is not unexpected.
By their own data, today is about 18GW for wind, and this time last week it was 3GW.
Could be higher - multiple Scottish windfarms are fully curtailed (developers paid for generation but the grid can’t distribute so they don’t use the power). Once the grid is upgraded with Easter Green Link 1-5 & Western Link 2, and the Scotwind Windfarms built this would be even higher!
Yes, if you count the Drax power plant as renewable, sure.
If you add to that deindustrialization and buying everything from abroad and not caring where that energy comes from, it’s super easy.
It's a biomass burning power plant. Biomass is absolutely renewable by any definition of "renewable". More can be grown on useful short term timescales.
Also, burning biomass does not affect the long term CO2 makeup of the atmosphere. The CO2 emitted was sequestered a decade ago, not 400 million years ago. Biomass carbon release is the normal carbon cycle of the earth.
It takes decades to grow the trees that then absorb the CO2 that is emitted from the burning, and the biomass that Drax burns has been (and still is) imported from Canada from felling old-growth forests (some of which have been estimated to be over 250 years old), and this isn't even considering the emissions from transporting the pellets via ship, rail and road from western Canada to eastern England which is not tracked against Drax.
The burning is still part of the short term carbon cycle, and biomass is still renewable.
Boreal forests in particular lose carbon sequestration capacity as they age, and from a carbon perspective cutting them down for lumber is a good thing. Wood pellets are generally from the waste material, not wood that could be used as lumber for houses or whatever.
You can certainly make other arguments in favor of not cutting down old growth forests, and certainly transport using fossil fuels is bad, but "I don't like how they go about it and also they release emissions that I don't care to understand how it fits into the carbon cycle" doesn't mean they "aren't renewable".
The point you could effectively make if you so chose would be "renewable energy sources are not cut and dry always a good thing".
Drax isn't included. There's even a specific note about this next to "Biomass" on the page.
This is a 'lawyer-worded' headline. I am an enormous fan of renewables, I am an electrical engineer who designs control systems for renewables exclusively. My career depends on renewables.
Headlines like this do nobody any favors. The problem with renewables is that you cannot run a grid on renewables alone. Many days will have an abundant oversupply, like the day shown. Many days will not. Consumers are not tolerant of brownouts in the west. We need pump storage hydro, we need massive improvements to the transmission system, and we need battery storage plants (in that order).
Its fine to celebrate days of high renewable GW output, but people get out the GW Bush 'mission accomplished' banners a little early. The generation is the cheap and easy part. The rest is expensive and slow and needs way more focus than it's getting if we ever want to make progress in the west (China is already figuring it out)
For those of us outside of Britain (i.e. 98% of us?) the message here isn't "mission accomplished" -- it's "Yes it's possible"
Well, in the sense that it's possible to be eating zero calories in the time between meals. You still need the meals. If you're just looking at brief snapshots, it doesn't tell you much.
It was a widely considered impossible to have more than single digit percentage of renewables even for instantaneous figures. That "limit" has been raised again and again as the world gets more experience with it.
It's great that we've made so much progress that people can say "it's just 90% renewable for 30 mins" but that's a result of decades of hard work.
You are conflating ideas here and it's getting muddled up. Literally nobody ever said that we couldn't handle 100% renewables for brief periods. The single digit percentage you're referring to is not about the renewables, it's about when the renewables aren't there. Its about maintaining grid stability when you don't have dispatchable sources to do it with. Essentially what we've built is a system where the renewables provide a tertiary function- providing power when they want to, but not in a reliable way, so we still have the same carbon based dispatchable resources.
This is not a serious system. We've done a bit of work on th cheap, easy part. Installing some solar panels is easy and costs almost nothing. The storage and transmission of power is 90% of the actual work!
It is literally written into regulations in many places that renewables aren't allowed to go above certain percentages even for short periods e.g in Ireland they are raising the cap by 5% every so often with an aim to get to 95% by 2035, it's currently 75% and was 50% when they brought in that particular rule.
In Australia they keep reducing the number of synchronous generators that are required to be connected as they gain more experience.
Renewables started as fringe tech and are now a trillion dollar industry. But they faced skepticsims at every stage along the way.
Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?
I'm hoping for some other technology apart from pumped hydro or batteries to be used for capturing surplus renewable energy for later use. It's unfortunate that hydrogen seems to be too complex to handle at these scales, it'd be utopian if it wasn't and the excess of renewables could be transformed into hydrogen for use in turbines instead of nat gas...
> Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?
Scotland seems to be a perfect place for pumped storage. I see that UK has 4 pumped storage stations, 2 in Wales, 2 in Scotland. But Scotland being quite far from most of UK's population may not be ideal if we're talking about supporting the whole country with pumped storage. It would be like 600km to the south of England.
HVDC would work quite well for a 600km transmission line, I don't think it needs UHVDC lines for that kind of distance.
There are several lined up for construction over the next 5-10yrs (eastern green link 1-5)
Why 600km exactly?
600km is roughly the distance from the hilly parts of Scotland to the south of England.
Yeah, the idea of people claiming that something on the Great Britain is too far and can't distribute power to something else on the Great Britain is laughable.
Next we'll have somebody from Lichtenstein saying the same about their country...
Well, I only said that if we're considering a ~fully renewable energy generation in the UK, with supply evened out by massive pumped storage projects, then locating all the storage in Scotland isn't ideal for the efficiency of the system. But yeah, I looked up the losses on HVDC lines, and it seems to be a non-issue (at least from a technical point of view). I also looked at a map of wind power[0] - seems concentrated on Scotland, so the distance from generation to potential storage would be quite short.
[0] https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-wind-power-t...
Iron air batteries sound promising
exactly, and they are cheap, right?
Pumped hydro needs a hill to pump up. That's why I said storage and transmission. We are laughably bad at moving power from where it is made (or stored) to where it is used and the worst part is it's not even a problem of science or engineering. We have it all figured out!
It's purely a problem of political will.
The headline is perfectly accurate… I’d say what you’re saying is a kind of whataboutism about stuff everybody knows…
Milestones like the one here are notable and interesting to most people!
and still somehow pay tons for "cheap" green electricity
Somehow? It’s a well established and publicised fact that it’s due to the price of gas. It’s so well established that anyone posting a comment here about the high price of electricity without mentioning it has an ulterior motive.
It's also widely misunderstood. Just because the spot price of electricity is set by the price of gas doesn’t mean the consumer pays that price for all of their electricity.
A lot of wind and solar are on Contracts for Difference. That means when market prices go above the agreed level, the generator pays the difference back through the scheme, which reduces supplier costs rather than the generator simply keeping the whole windfall.
This is particularly relevant when e.g. the price of gas goes way up due to the Iran war, it doesn't mean that the consumer ends up paying more for the energy from wind
So who's working on fixing it? It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature. Meanwhile you have folks seeing these three things together:
- England is 90% renewables
- Renewables are a really cheap source of energy.
- England has very high energy prices.
And the obvious conclusion is that someone is lying. It's eroding support for renewables among those that don't have time to investigate how or why the spot price of gas sets the overall energy price.
>England is 90% renewables
The thing is, it's nowhere near 90% in general. 90% is the generation right now, with sunlight and good wind. On the site you can see that renewables were 66% in the last 24h, 46% in the last week, and 42% in the last year. I don't think it's possible to have 90% renewable generation overall without massive energy storage.
>It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature.
It kind of is.
Gas is the only source of electricity currently which can be scaled up and down at will and on demand.
Even once grids eventually go 100% green we will probably still use (green, synthesised) stored gas as the power source of last resort on cold, windless nights after batteries and pumped storage have been depleted.
My understanding is that legislation is in the works to fix that. But we’ll see.
Yesterday it was announced that a trial would take place so that regions near wind farms can receive free energy from them in periods of curtailment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNewsUK/s/jG5OCSWTTy
Unless i'm reading this wrong I'm pretty sure i already have this in the UK nad have done for years. What's the trial even for...
It’s not currently happening in the UK.
A lot of wind power is generated in Scotland, for example. The power conduits that transmit power along the country can often not deliver all of that power to the South on a windy day. There is an excess of power in the north but the wind farms cannot deliver it, they are not paid to generate power so they switch their wind turbines off, even though there is wind available to capture.
This new test means that wind farms will not switch off in such conditions and electricity prices will be allowed to fall to zero, but only for those in the local area.
Are you sure?
The Octopus subreddit seem pretty convinced they get negative pricing when its windy.
It’s not the same thing. Customers on some of Octopus’ tariffs get occasional zero or negative pricing to spur demand that can help balance the grid or reduce curtailment.
This trial is different. I think the real goal is to incentivise local communities to support the construction of wind farms. If you have a wind farm nearby, surplus generation is used to supply you with free power when otherwise the turbines would have been curtailed.
It's not only the price of gas but also the price of the co2 emissions. I'm really surprised the uk didn't get rid of it when they left the eu. It's one of the most stupid things possible. It only makes everything more expensive.
That would make British people less poor for once so they decided against it. Managed economic decline and mass immigration go hand in hand with globalism and ‘global warming’ extremists.
If you’ve got even a passing interest in the UK energy market you’d know this is because of the wholesale price of gas, not the actual wholesale cost of solar and wind.
If you really want to pay less for green energy, which is cheap when it’s plentiful (like anything) get on a variable tariff and install some storage.
how does the wholesale price of gas explain how the UK is the most expensive in the world/europe?
tldr: Marginal Pricing
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-does-gas-set-the-price-of...
> In the UK, the marginal unit is almost always a gas-fired power plant. As a result, one widely cited academic analysis found that gas set the price of power 97% of the time in the UK in 2021.
Stop seeing this through the eyes of a consumer. On a macro scale, your country is not handing hundreds of millions of pounds a day over to other countries. Now imagine if it still was. You'd be even worse off.
Of course they are sending millions of pounds a day to other countries. In this case China for the panels.
They're not burning panels.
Almost every normal person sees this through the eyes of the consumer because paying the electric bill is their primary interaction with the issue. What you're describing is politically a tough sell.
It worked before, so start the buses:
"We send the UAE £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead"
"We send Saudi Arabia £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead"
"We send Qatar £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead"
Good thing they won't be needing any of that LNG from the Gulf.
Really cool! Would be nice to have some explanatory legends at some locations, like for transfers (eg "Positive when GB -> x, negative when x -> GB")
9.4% is Gas + Biomass (not clean)
But there’s a generation surplus and export of +13.4%!
What about tonight?
Why don't they count pumped storage and batteries as renewable?
Because they’re not generation, they’re storage. You need to charge them and that charge can come from any source.
They are storage. They should count as neither.
Yes, because its windy today
11am, nicely sunny-ish and quite windy here... and so 65% wind, 25% solar.
If by renewables you mean lumber from Canada, then sure.
I assume you are referring to Drax? That should come under biomass, which is 2.5% currently. I don't think the practice is great but that's clearly not where the energy is coming from. 87.7% of UK energy generation at this moment is coming from solar and wind.
Sorry, what are you implying here? That people burn lumber from Canada to heat their homes?
They’re referring to the source of wood pellets for the Drax power plant i.e. this https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/26/drax-pow...
The landscape has been destroyed by wind turbines, and energy prices are higher than ever. lose lose.
It’s a bit more complex than that. Octopus do a deal where you can lease a car and get the energy for it for free provided you agree to have it plugged in > x hrs a month. My read on that is that the cost of balancing the grid is greater than the cost of generating power. So grid is expensive, but power is cheap.
> The landscape has been destroyed by wind turbines
What? Have you even been to the UK?
> energy prices are higher than ever
Because electricity prices are tied to gas prices (not to mention that wars near countries that export gas don't help bringing prices down).
And thats not how good renewables are- thats how deindustrialized britain has become. And deindustrialization leads to debt slavery - and debt slavery either leads to passing on that bitter chalice to others (empire) or to becoming a colony.
> deindustrialization leads to debt slavery
Ok I’ll bite — how? Surely not because manufacturing is the only way to create value?
As you denindustrialize, your normal working class population rebells - demanding its lifestyle to remain untouched- thus subsidized by the state. So the state either prints money costing the world (us-model) or it prints money- costing the future. As this happens and future generations get poorer- the idea to lend from foreign "investors" which then take over your country becomes the default solution - until you are a debt colony, owned by those lending you money.
They downvote you because this website calls itself progressive but it loves offshoring and basically anything that hurts the working class.