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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

#231

Post by gotwaz »

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…

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.

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

#232

Post by LunaSea »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #25
PunchyHamster wrote: post #7

and still somehow pay tons for "cheap" green electricity

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.

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

#233

Post by skippyboxedhero »

jordand wrote: post #202
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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.

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

#234

Post by sjducb »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #146
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…

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?

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

#235

Post by jeffbee »

eliben wrote: post #5
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…

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.

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.

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

#236

Post by margalabargala »

adamckay wrote: post #196
margalabargala wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tra…

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".

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

#237

Post by DrBazza »

shadowgovt wrote: post #194
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…

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 energ…

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.

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

#238

Post by jeffbee »

xp84 wrote: post #216

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…

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.

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

#239

Post by eigenspace »

stavros wrote: post #223
eigenspace wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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).

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

#240

Post by gehsty »

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!
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