Why are UK electricity bills so expensive? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

#81

Post by bfmalky » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 5:54 PM UTC

smeeger wrote: post #40

jorblumesea wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rich, given you seem to be American.

you have to admit english people have a weird tick when it comes to poverty. you worship poor people. and yes, you guys willingly live like you are poor when you guys are definitely not poor

This is such a weird take. I have no idea where you are getting your ideas from, but I don't know if you've heard of this thing we have in the UK called 'the class system'. Poor people are definitely not worshipped in the UK. And the wealthy do generally like to demonstrate their wealth in the usual ways (cars, homes, holidays, schooling, etc), so I'm wondering where you've got this idea that people in the UK somehow romanticise poverty.

Re: Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

#82

Post by amiga386 » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #31

I find it so weird that UK citizens have often just sort of passively chosen to be poor. Like they still had food rationing for years after WW2. Is there some sort of cultural blind spot which prevents them from understanding that there are better ways to do things?

I find it weird that medical bankruptcies are a thing, or people involved in car crashes demanding they don't get an ambulance and critical emergency care, because they know they'll be billed thousands or hundreds of thousands for being out-of-network.

Is there some sort of cultural blind-spot?

Or maybe each country has their own ups and downs, and we can accept that even if there is objectively a "better way" to do things, and a country's government can be convinced to try this better way, it stil has to bring the people along with it, and those millions of people all have all kinds of hangups and incentives that get in the way; politics are hard.

With regard to post-war food rationing, much of it was due to crop failure or stockpiles being ruined by terrible weather, and obviously the rest of Europe was ravaged and destroyed. But it was also political. Labour liked rationing and the Tories didn't, and the Tories stoked public anger at it. Clearly the UK citizens didn't like it, it was the main fight of the 1950 general election.... which Labour narrowly won. Then Labour called a snap election in 1951, won a record high voteshare, but narrowly lost to the Tories.

If you're genuinuely interested in the topic, Wikipedia has an informative timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...

Re: Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

#83

Post by vel0city » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #78

vel0city wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you get some big energy dry spell and rates go to 1,000x their normal price and it starts costing you $20 to run the kettle for a few minutes. Hopefully you noticed that spike in prices ahead of time!

The fixed rates that companies charge just smooth out these variances since they all pay a variable rate behind the scenes. The fixed rate providers will do rolling brownouts if the grid gets to this state to save themselves from ruin. If you're on a variable rate you can choose to cut yourself off in these periods. Essentially the downside you mention is worse on the fixed rate: On fixed rate you'll have no power at…

> they did this in Texas

That is not what happened in Texas. The REPs had zero say to do a rolling brownout. "Rolling" outages which became semi-permanent outages were done by the delivery companies, not the retail providers. Retail providers can't just choose to stop selling me electricity for a few hours because they think it's too unprofitable for them, that's not allowed in the contract. My REP at the time probably had some massive costs due to customers like me which didn't lose power; they folded and sold the contract to another company.

> On a variable rate you can choose to cut yourself off or not.

Once again, you clearly don't know what actually happened in Texas. Several people I know on variable rate plans lost power for days.

But hey keep speaking falsehoods instead of actually learning what happened.

Re: Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

#84

Post by vel0city » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 5:56 PM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #70

vel0city wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This buyout program provides a viable pathway forward for our most vulnerable community members > Hong estimates that his home would have been worth about $3.6 million two years ago Yeah, this person who was able to afford a $3.6M home sure sounds like "our most vulnerable" people. He needs a bailout for making a poor decision on buying that house in a place prone to landslides. Not the hungry kids in our schools w…

Then it should be obvious to you the parallels with Paradise, CA, where average home sales prices were at $700k just prior to the wildfire, growing faster than San Francisco’s prices: the reason we are doing this bailout is due to the politically powerful interests of a lot of wealthy savers. The people in this thread saying “it’s PG&E’s fault” are incredibly naive.

> Then it should be obvious to you the parallels with Paradise, CA

It is. Insane all ratepayers are shouldering all the cost to rebuild rich people's mansions.

Re: Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

#85

Post by piva00 » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 5:57 PM UTC

graybeardhacker wrote: post #64

The graph shows the price for 3100 kWh. I'm not sure if that is a very low annual amount or a very very high monthly amount. The average US household uses 10,000 kWh annually ~833 kWh per month. So I'm guessing most Americans reading the article and looking at the interactive graph are thinking either: this is very cheap or very expensive, depending on whether they are assuming it's monthly or annual. In the US the a…

Median income and take home pay should be brought into account though. California has one of the highest even by US standards so a $1000 bill for the median Californian family feels much less expensive than for the median Manchester family.

Re: Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

#86

Post by bfmalky » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 5:59 PM UTC

graybeardhacker wrote: post #64

The graph shows the price for 3100 kWh. I'm not sure if that is a very low annual amount or a very very high monthly amount. The average US household uses 10,000 kWh annually ~833 kWh per month. So I'm guessing most Americans reading the article and looking at the interactive graph are thinking either: this is very cheap or very expensive, depending on whether they are assuming it's monthly or annual. In the US the a…

That's the annual figure. But just for electricity. Most UK homes are heated with gas, and many have gas stoves, so the average kWh annual gas figure is much higher (~12,000kWh).

Re: Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

#87

Post by amiga386 » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 6:04 PM UTC

RobotToaster wrote: post #49

amiga386 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting rathole to go down. On the one hand, there are private equity firms buying power stations and deliberately turning them off to reduce supply, knowing that National Grid will call them in a few hours paying them an even higher rate to turn them back on... but also those operators get detected and, months later, fined out the wazoo by the regulator for pulling a stunt like that. https://www.theguard…

> but also those operators get detected and, months later, fined out the wazoo by the regulator for pulling a stunt like that. The ones that were detected were fined, we don't know how much of that goes on but more subtly.

How does one subtly turn off a power station?

National Grid plc has minute-by-minute graphs. It can see you taking the piss, and its friends in Ofgem are on speed-dial.

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2023-08/Final%2...

Re: Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

#88

Post by rcxdude » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 6:07 PM UTC

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #78

vel0city wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you get some big energy dry spell and rates go to 1,000x their normal price and it starts costing you $20 to run the kettle for a few minutes. Hopefully you noticed that spike in prices ahead of time!

The fixed rates that companies charge just smooth out these variances since they all pay a variable rate behind the scenes. The fixed rate providers will do rolling brownouts if the grid gets to this state to save themselves from ruin. If you're on a variable rate you can choose to cut yourself off in these periods. Essentially the downside you mention is worse on the fixed rate: On fixed rate you'll have no power at…

The second part is indeed wrong: most consumer energy markets have a wholesale market and grid operator, and the grid operator is ultimately responsible for the call on brown-outs. The companies that sell electricity retail to invididual homes are generally buying on that wholesale market, but they're not in a position to cut off their customers: there's straight-up no mechanism to do that on a moment's notice, because the grid-level control doesn't overlap with the retail seller's customers (these retail companies are often basically just a financial instrument that turns the combination of variable wholesale and grid operator fees into a fixed price bill and some customer support: your neighbour can buy from a completely different company and if anyone wants to shut off you but not them they need to come to your house and physically disconnect the lines). What happens in a situation like texas is that the retail companies who are selling at a fixed price start losing money fast, and can't really do anything about it in the short term. If they've built up enough of a buffer from their margins, they may survive, or they may go bankrupt and their customers will need to move to a different provider, but that's a process that takes weeks to months, not minutes in a price spike.

(A similar thing happened in the UK: there weren't any brown-outs, but the spike in wholesale energy prices sent a lot of smaller retail energy companies under. If you were with one of them, like I was, you had no interruption to your supply and in fact won out compared to those on variable tarrifs: the losers were the investors in the retail companies and those who they were unable to pay).

I will agree in general though: unless you have particularly unusual energy consumption habits, or think that the energy market will go up more than the retail companies thing they will, you'll probably win out on a variable rate contract over time, especially if you have a battery to time-shift your consumption (And with the most common UK provider for this, there is still a cap on how much you'll pay, even if wholesale prices skyrocket like they did in Texas).

Re: Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

#89

Post by jillesvangurp » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 6:09 PM UTC

An important reason that power is expensive in the UK is that it doesn't use zonal pricing and is effectively not giving the right price signals to consumers of power to move closer to where the cheap power is (e.g. data centers) or to conserve power when power is expensive; or producers of power to invest in power generation closer to where the power is scarce and expensive.

Another point to make is that the national wholesale price of power in the UK is based on the price of the most expensive thing in the market at any point. Which now that they shut down coal is usually gas which at this point the UK mostly imports because gas production in the North Sea fields has been petering out. It no longer is the cheap resource it once was.

Even Scotland which either exports or curtails dirt cheap wind power most of the time gets to pay expensive gas rates for their power. Why is power curtailment a thing there? Because there is no price incentive to use the power. Otherwise people might be doing sane things like charging their EVs, powering their heat pumps, etc. Instead Scotland imports gas for heating and petrol for driving their cars. At the same time they curtail wind power by the GW.

Greg Jackson from Octopus (who are the largest energy operator in the UK) has been calling for this for some time. I don't live there but his name comes up a lot in several of the clean energy podcasts I follow. Smart person that has a lot of sensible things to say on this topic.

Re: Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

#90

Post by toolslive » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 6:12 PM UTC

smeeger wrote: post #40

jorblumesea wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rich, given you seem to be American.

you have to admit english people have a weird tick when it comes to poverty. you worship poor people. and yes, you guys willingly live like you are poor when you guys are definitely not poor

It's a cultural difference I observed between Europeans and Americans: Americans hate it being called unsuccessful/poor, but don't mind being called dumb. Europeans hate being called stupid, but don't mind being called unsuccessful/poor. Obviously, it's not a binary thing, but there's some fundamental difference in attitude.