251–260 of 313 posts
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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.
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> 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…
:-( 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 ou…
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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.
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> 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…
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 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 ;-)
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:-( 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 ou…
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 tu…
With the bike lanes, public transport, solar panels, and wind turbines, it even beats that problematic yogurt commercial…
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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.
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.
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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 tu…
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'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…
....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 th…
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 :(
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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…
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.
> 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…
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.