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Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

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Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#171

Post by leonidasrup »

simonsquiff wrote: post #152
enlyth wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#172

Post by enlyth »

simonsquiff wrote: post #152
enlyth wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#173

Post by energy123 »

roenxi wrote: post #105
trollbridge wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Probably because it doesn't make economic sense to install storage prior to renewables being so substantial that you start having to curtail.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#174

Post by mytailorisrich »

jordand wrote: post #154
mytailorisrich wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...).

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#175

Post by irishcoffee »

djhworld wrote: post #130
terabytest wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#176

Post by pornel »

rwmj wrote: post #145
djhworld wrote: post #109

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…

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?

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.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#177

Post by skippyboxedhero »

jordand wrote: post #134
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 econ…

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 i…

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.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#178

Post by ZeroGravitas »

nickslaughter02 wrote: post #3

> 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 c…

> 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.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#179

Post by djhworld »

irishcoffee wrote: post #175
djhworld wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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 hotte…

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.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#180

Post by mike_hearn »

traceroute66 wrote: post #31
ghighi7878 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Nucl…

> 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 de…

> 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.

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