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Earlier quoted context omitted.
UK is legally required to set the price of electricity to whichever generator has the highest cost - which is natural gas. Its called marginal cost pricing.
Are there any efforts to fix this?
Does this cancel out the high energy prices people in the UK have been paying for the past decade+? Part of the reason the bills are high is because they subsidise the installation of renewable generation.
In hindsight it was quite prescient to be installing renewables wasn't it.
My guess is that £20bn/year is a fair cost overall in subsidy payments. This is clearly not offset by natural gas fuel savings even with elevated prices.
The UK IMO made a couple of critical mistakes. Firstly, far too much offshore wind is in Scotland when it should have been closer to population centres in England. A few factors for this but the issue is planning is devolved to Scotland (so they have every incentive to approve as many) but energy subsidies are set by Westminster. By the time UK central government realised this it was too late (or they didn't want to rock the cart for political reasons post/during Scottish independence referendum).
We're now having to pay £20-30bn+ to get Scottish wind generation down to England where it is needed (primarily through new 5 (!) 2GW HVDCs from Scotland to England). It would have been far far better just to... build those wind farms closer to England. This would have still required grid upgrades but far cheaper ones (bringing it 100-200km to population centres instead of all the way from Scotland, plus you still need to do the ones in England on top of that for the most part to get it from the HVDC landing sites to the population centres).
The second major issue is there is definitely massive diminishing returns from adding more renewables at this point. There's too many renewables on the grid a lot of the time, even if transmission was perfect - supply is outstripping demand. Instead of building more and more generation the subsidies should be redirected towards storage projects.
But overall, for the same £20bn a year you could have probably built 5 Hinckley Point C sized 3.2GW nuclear plants concurrently (assuming £4bn a year capex for 10 years). In 20 years you'd have probably 30GW of nuclear built, which should cover nearly all electricity demand in the UK in that time, with very limited transmission costs (existing nuclear plants have good grid connections and you build them close to them). And importantly, you would basically eliminate _any_ dependence on gas from the UK grid. Clearly nuclear has risks in project delivery, but at least it's reliable once built.
We have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. The politicians obsess over net-zero at the expense of dealing with the issues affecting most people.
What if a happy byproduct of pushing for net zero is more investment in renewables, and decoupling the electricity price from gas?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the reason why we have high electricity costs (here in the UK) is that we peg the price to gas generation, on the face of it people complain about that but the higher price allows investments in renewables to make sense on an RoI PoV, effectively it's a subsidy to build out renewables at a higher rate than would otherwise be the case. Electricity prices are high in the UK but there is a net benefit to it at l…
Isn't that just an excuse to justify the scam? Texas has very low electricity prices and at the same time a growing share of renewables.
This is amazing news. I look forward to my bills going up again next month!
Are you referring to the war Trump started, or are you all climate denying loons who love Trump and think net-zero is a Chinese hoax?
Or just nihilists that just think the world is going to shit in multiple ways and refuse to even contemplate small silver linings on dark clouds?
It's impossible to tell from these quips.
We have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. The politicians obsess over net-zero at the expense of dealing with the issues affecting most people.
You seem to make the same comments in every thread about renewable energy regardless of what's actually happening.
The issue though is that the UK spends something along the lines of £10-25bn (depending how you count subsidies) a year on renewable. Something like £10bn in direct subsidies via CfD and RO, then another ~£1.5-2bn on curtailment (paying wind farms to turn off), ~£3bn in balancing market costs, and £6bn on transmission upgrade costs (passed back to consumers/businesses) to upgrade transmission for nearly always renewa…
This is amazing news. I look forward to my bills going up again next month!
It says something that the people running the monopoly cash machine are asking questions about bankrupting their customers/ability to pay but politicians are shutting their eyes and pounding onto the accelerator. What a world.