There are grid scale batteries on the UK grid. Surely they’re being used.
One could work out what the discrepancy between consumption and production during the day to infer the battery discharge rate, but I don’t think there’s anything there…
There has been talk, seemingly power generation dispatch a year or so ago was do e by phoning up the power station and saying “More amperes please Mr Woodbine”.
My understanding is this is being written to an automatic system which isn’t fully commissioned.
Grid battery owners a few years go were irate that they weren’t in the offing to sell power. But that must be resolved by now, since so much money is being invested in it.
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 see the benefit where prices drop to zero or even negative, which is great if you have an EV or something to dump lots of power into. Looking at todays prices they're like 1-3p p/kWh!
But that doesn't last, as the wind dies things start to get back to normal.
The key with the tariff though is to just play the averages and generally avoid high power usage during the peak periods. My average for the last 2 years was around 30% cheaper (p/year) than what I would have paid if I was on a normal energy tariff.
It will be interesting to see whether that trend continues, especially with the state the world has suddenly been thrown into.
I wonder if we'll start to see gimmicks in home appliances for taking advantage of variable prices.
Like for EV charging I assume it's a basic requirement, you simply wouldn't buy a car that didn't let you adjust the charging schedule based on cost.
But what about... Freezers? Maybe there are scenarios where your freezer could drop 20° below its usual temp while prices are low, and thereby avoid running the compressor for several hours while prices are high.
What about a tumble dryer button that says "these clothes are fine to stay wet for up to 8 hours, dry them at the cheapest moment during that window"?
TBH I doubt these things would really pay for themselves but as a consumer I'd still be tempted by the "lol, neat" factor.
Also I assume the local-LLM heads are already finding ways to have their agents do useful work while the GPU can churn tokens for almost-free.
Also makes me think of fun Home Assistant workflows. Like, "when energy is expensive, just try to keep the house between 16-26°. When energy approaches free, I want to live at exactly 20°". (I assume heat pumps also have ways to take advantage of this in more roundabout ways).
I think freezers would definitely be a gimmick as they don't really use that much power.
I can see it being a nice feature for higher-load tasks though, e.g. my dishwasher uses about 1.8kWh for a cycle. On this tariff it's trivial to compute the best start-end time based on the 30 minute price windows, so if the dishwasher could do that it would be pretty sweet. Right now my dishwasher just supports a 3h delay function. I wouldn't mind if my dishwasher had a (local) API you could hit to control its schedule. Sadly this usually comes with some cloud requirement though.
Things like freezers don't take a huge amount of power. It's definitely about things that do space heating/cooling. The traditional approach is to put your electric water heater on a timer. That way you can schedule your hot water use on a consistent schedule but only heat the water at night when you can be sure the rates are lower.
You can basically do that today if you wanted to by buying consumer grade batteries and smart switches. A whole house battery would be better, but it's more expensive to install.
For the tumble drier and dishwasher, those usually come with time delay features. That's usually good enough if your goal is to timeshift a load.
I have a battery for my fridge not for this purpose, but because I'd rather not have a power outage spoil my food.
Many homes in Norway has this. Its a smart plug in your fuse box. For me it offsets EV charging untill the electricity is at its cheapest, it also cuts down on heating for the peak hours etc etc.
That's a great system. Like so many things, success comes down to implementation.
In California, for example, PG&E will charge you the maximum peak demand prices while simultaneously paying other states to take electricity during the solar duck curve.
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.
How are the fixed costs in this? Here in Sweden I have seen a strong trend that as the grid has become more variable and connected to the European grid, a larger portion of the bill becomes fixed. For most part of the year, the fixed costs are now greater than costs that scale with consumption.
Transmission and construction, crewing and maintenance of of thermal power plants (under the name of "reserve energy") cost a lot of money, which in turn becomes fixed grid costs. On top of that you got consumption costs during periods of poor weather, which in combination of high fossil fuel costs means that the consumption prices spikes. The cost of energy during optimal weather conditions is in contrast so low that at this point they can basically just be rounded down to zero.
"Some of the modelling we have suggests that you could get to a position by 2030 where if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be the same as where they are today because of the increase in non-commodity costs."
Fixed costs are enormous and are increasingly driven by paying for the CFDs that back up the economics of wind. The CFD scheme allows wind producers to de-risk from market prices by locking in a fixed price with the government who then recover this from bills.
So, yes you get to enjoy low variable costs when it's windy, but you pay for the priviledge year round.
I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy.
Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.
....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 that the price of electricty is dictated by gas so maybe decoupling that will help - but that probably has complications with balancing the grid.
The tariff I'm on (Octopus Agile) suits me as I WFH, have an EV and it's just me living in the house, I can move my usage outside of hte peak periods quite easily and I built a website to help me find the cheapest charging periods for my car based on the prices for the next day. The other day my average unit rate was like 2p per/kWh and I dumped like 30kWh into my car lol
Yes - the wholesale price of electricity can sometimes be very low (or negative), particularly when there is a lot of wind. And some tariffs pass that on to consumers. But I don't see how it works at scale.
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 :(
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.
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?
Some chargers communicate directly with the energy supplier and charge at the cheaper rates.
You can do this yourself as well with home assistant (if your charger supports it) and some API calls. It's just a matter of telling the charger when to start and stop the charge. The rest of the communication between the charger and the car is some protocol I can't remember the name of.
Could be wrong but I guess it more likely communicates with the charger. The car will always try to draw if it's plugged in, but most chargers can be switched on ("charge") and off ("don't charge") remotely. It's probably quite trivial to have something watch the price of power and on/off as appropriate
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 advantage of the cheap periods you'll generally come out on top. My average unit rate last year was like 16.5p p/kWh whereas the standard tariff was 23-24p, so some nice savings. There's also some risk involved - the price can go up to £1 p/kWh and a few days in winter in 2024 it did that for a short while (around the peak periods) so you have to take on that risk - and obviously being exposed to the world energy markets does mean you get exposure to stuff like wars impacting global markets.
I mean there's nothing stopping you from using lots of power between 4pm-7pm it's just you'll drag that average unit rate up to the point where it's probably not worth it. When I say "use lots of power" I don't mean like I sit in the dark between 4-7pm, it's just I avoid the big ticket power users like ovens, showers, cookers etc
Not GP but I assume the fixed prices have to be fairly high to account for people using lots of power during peak demand when most people use lots of power?
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. Nuclear might come next.
Gas generators often have the highest costs, because they have to buy gas to burn, as well as paying a "carbon price" - a charge for emissions.
The wholesale cost is set by the last unit of electricity needed to meet demand from consumers. This means that even if gas only generates 1% of power at a given time, gas will still set the wholesale price.
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 designed to generate profit. Norway made a different choice. Equinor is majority state-owned, and Norwegian extraction operates within a framework designed to capture resource rents for public benefit. Britain privatised its way out of that option decades ago in the Thatcher-era and has never seriously revisited it.
Analysis from the University of Oxford[1] found that maximising oil and gas extraction from the North Sea would only save households £16 to £82 per year – and this would rely on tax revenues collected being distributed to households to offset their energy bills.
Dr Anupam Sen, co-author of the analysis, said the idea that “draining” the North Sea would make the UK more energy secure and significantly cut household bills is “sheer fantasy”. “We show that regardless of the remaining lifetime of North Sea oil and gas, a ‘drill baby drill’ approach to extraction would actually cost households more money versus continuing on our path to clean energy.”
The authors stress that savings gained from the clean energy transition are recurring annual reductions in bills which would continue indefinitely, whereas North Sea oil and gas are finite resources that would run out around 2040.
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.
Yeah I'm in the UK and for electricity, I'm on the green Octopus Agile tariff, which tracks the wholesale price updating every 30 mins. Given the abundant green energy today, and peak times between 3-7pm, right this second I'm paying £0.02/kWh, but at 6pm, I'll be charged £0.40/kWh. In the coming months with gas supply reduced, and consumer demand steady, it will have a knock on impact to me given it tracks wholesale cost so I'll have to consider moving off the tariff given I'll be paying more overall.
They aren't orthogonal - the reason that gas is being used is because renewable can't reliably power the grid! If you look at something like https://grid.iamkate.com/ you can see that in the last 24 hours the gas peak is when the wind dies down and the sun isn't shining, around 6-8pm. Happens to be a real price peak at that time. This isn't some weird and unexpected outcome, we've had at least a decade of evidence with this sort of low-wholesale-high-retail price dynamic.
That isn't gas is expensive, it is simply policy that the UK, rather naively, is trying to run their grid 24/7 based on processes that are not available 24/7. That is an expensive trick to try and pull off. Poor people need a way to signal that they won't use electricity in the evening if they want to be able to afford power is my read on the situation. Not very civilised but if that is how the UK approaches reliable cheap energy as a target then it seems the most reasonable outcome.
You can read more about gas markets in the Global Gas Market guide by A115 here: https://a115.co.uk/global-gas-market/ (you can download the PDF guide at the bottom without giving any information)
I've read this before and I don't understand how this doesn't become/is untenable.
Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
Also, this would mean that in order to really bring the price down, gas needs to be taken out as a source. But gas is typically the source that balances the grid because its output can be changed quickly. So price wise, you might get a drop but you would lose your ability to react quickly to fluctuations in demand
Which, importantly, drives more renewables and storage development because it makes the renewables fantastically profitable to run: near zero cost for you, but paid the price set by gas.
> 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.
Without mentioning how Contracts for Difference (CfD) works, this is a slightly disingenuous oversimplification.
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.
Obviously, Electricity is a National Security issue.
It's naive to state that the problem is gas prices.
Germany is seeing Steel, Automotive, and other hard science companies leave for that very reason.
The strategy should have been to build an energy architecture that reduces prices while being robust against force majeure events.
This is of course linked to the UKs renewable rollout (and to do with detaips around the UKs energy markets leading to gas dictating the price for noe), but completely misses the fact that the UKs spending isn't just spending but investment.
Will be interesting to see in five years time looks like, we could well see a scenario where the UK has abundant cheap electricity being exported to the rest of Europe. Will be interesting to hear what the sceptics holding some American states fossil fuel based grids up as examples think then.
None of this of couse factors in the fact that fossil fuels cannot be sustained if we want a livable planet. Factoring that in, payimg energy bills three times as high would be a good investment, if it protects the world we depend on, in my book at least.
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.
The title may be misleading, but IMO not for the reasons you mentioned. "90%" is based on generation right now, live. On the site from the post you can see that for the last day (24h) renewable generation was 66%, for the last week 46%, for the last year 42%. So it's nowhere near 90% renewable in general, but it is 90% at the moment (there's sunlight and good wind). Emissions on the website from the post are lower than on the website you linked - 107 g/kWh for the week, 124 for the year - but I don't know why that is.
Because nuclear. Which is a great 20th century French achievement !
If the EPR2 doesn’t spiral into costing £17.5bn per unit as the UK-PWR has, perhaps we can get them in to “rustle me up a nuclear power station” or two, in the words of Tony Blair.
The subsidies for the EPR2 fleet is a 10 euro cents per kWh CFD and interest free loans. With the first reactor coming online in 2038 at the earliest.
That sums up towards 20 cents per kWh in total.
It’s an absolutely horrifyingly expensive boondoggle before they have even started, and it won’t deliver any electricity in the relevant timeframes for electrifying industry and society.
On top of this EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for their existing paid off nuclear fleet. Let alone new builds.
And that is France which has been extremely protectionistic shielding their nuclear fleet from renewable
competition, and even then its already leaking in on pure economics.
France has an amazingly developed grid, with a lot of nuclear. But I think there's a risk of seeing grid make ups as "one size fits all". Norway and Sweden do well with huge amounts of hydro storage, but few countries have the geography for that level of hydro. Similarly, the UK has an abundance of offshore wind (especially in Scotland), so further developing that (rather than focusing heavily on nuclear because it works in France) is by no means a bad idea.
Yet still it costs several pounds a day to heat your home in winter. People are going back to log burners. I've never seen so much coal/wood sold at the supermarkets during winter. I've got some electric blankets which is great but really energy costs seem to be spiralling.
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 for EV charging at night.
We are paying 26 cents (£0.20) except for 4-9PM when it’s 59 cents (£0.44). Plus a monthly base charge which they just increased.
Those answers won't be too helpful. We have very high bills compared internationally, due to a difficult-to-explain quirk (pay-as-clear marginal pricing) where all electricity is charged to the customer at the highest rate possible at that moment. So wind may cost 0.05 pkwh and be freely available but if gas is being utilised anywhere else in the grid at a cost of eg. 0.45 then everybody gets charged 0.45 pkwh, even for the wind energy.
Its a messed up system which means often pay the highest in Europe, without even helping that much towards the tax coffers. But reform of this system does seem to be gaining a bit of political momentum.
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.
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!
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 tracked against Drax.
Somehow? It’s a well established and publicised fact that it’s due to the price of gas. It’s so well established that anyone posting a comment here about the high price of electricity without mentioning it has an ulterior motive.
It's also widely misunderstood. Just because the spot price of electricity is set by the price of gas doesn’t mean the consumer pays that price for all of their electricity.
A lot of wind and solar are on Contracts for Difference. That means when market prices go above the agreed level, the generator pays the difference back through the scheme, which reduces supplier costs rather than the generator simply keeping the whole windfall.
This is particularly relevant when e.g. the price of gas goes way up due to the Iran war, it doesn't mean that the consumer ends up paying more for the energy from wind
So who's working on fixing it? It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature. Meanwhile you have folks seeing these three things together:
- England is 90% renewables
- Renewables are a really cheap source of energy.
- England has very high energy prices.
And the obvious conclusion is that someone is lying. It's eroding support for renewables among those that don't have time to investigate how or why the spot price of gas sets the overall energy price.
It's not only the price of gas but also the price of the co2 emissions. I'm really surprised the uk didn't get rid of it when they left the eu. It's one of the most stupid things possible. It only makes everything more expensive.
If you’ve got even a passing interest in the UK energy market you’d know this is because of the wholesale price of gas, not the actual wholesale cost of solar and wind.
If you really want to pay less for green energy, which is cheap when it’s plentiful (like anything) get on a variable tariff and install some storage.
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.
Almost every normal person sees this through the eyes of the consumer because paying the electric bill is their primary interaction with the issue. What you're describing is politically a tough sell.
This is a 'lawyer-worded' headline.
I am an enormous fan of renewables, I am an electrical engineer who designs control systems for renewables exclusively. My career depends on renewables.
Headlines like this do nobody any favors. The problem with renewables is that you cannot run a grid on renewables alone. Many days will have an abundant oversupply, like the day shown. Many days will not. Consumers are not tolerant of brownouts in the west. We need pump storage hydro, we need massive improvements to the transmission system, and we need battery storage plants (in that order).
Its fine to celebrate days of high renewable GW output, but people get out the GW Bush 'mission accomplished' banners a little early. The generation is the cheap and easy part. The rest is expensive and slow and needs way more focus than it's getting if we ever want to make progress in the west (China is already figuring it out)
Well, in the sense that it's possible to be eating zero calories in the time between meals. You still need the meals. If you're just looking at brief snapshots, it doesn't tell you much.
Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?
I'm hoping for some other technology apart from pumped hydro or batteries to be used for capturing surplus renewable energy for later use. It's unfortunate that hydrogen seems to be too complex to handle at these scales, it'd be utopian if it wasn't and the excess of renewables could be transformed into hydrogen for use in turbines instead of nat gas...
> Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?
Scotland seems to be a perfect place for pumped storage. I see that UK has 4 pumped storage stations, 2 in Wales, 2 in Scotland. But Scotland being quite far from most of UK's population may not be ideal if we're talking about supporting the whole country with pumped storage. It would be like 600km to the south of England.
Pumped hydro needs a hill to pump up. That's why I said storage and transmission. We are laughably bad at moving power from where it is made (or stored) to where it is used and the worst part is it's not even a problem of science or engineering. We have it all figured out!
I assume you are referring to Drax? That should come under biomass, which is 2.5% currently. I don't think the practice is great but that's clearly not where the energy is coming from. 87.7% of UK energy generation at this moment is coming from solar and wind.
It’s a bit more complex than that. Octopus do a deal where you can lease a car and get the energy for it for free provided you agree to have it plugged in > x hrs a month. My read on that is that the cost of balancing the grid is greater than the cost of generating power. So grid is expensive, but power is cheap.
And thats not how good renewables are- thats how deindustrialized britain has become. And deindustrialization leads to debt slavery - and debt slavery either leads to passing on that bitter chalice to others (empire) or to becoming a colony.
As you denindustrialize, your normal working class population rebells - demanding its lifestyle to remain untouched- thus subsidized by the state. So the state either prints money costing the world (us-model) or it prints money- costing the future. As this happens and future generations get poorer- the idea to lend from foreign "investors" which then take over your country becomes the default solution - until you are a debt colony, owned by those lending you money.
There are grid scale batteries on the UK grid. Surely they’re being used.
One could work out what the discrepancy between consumption and production during the day to infer the battery discharge rate, but I don’t think there’s anything there…
There has been talk, seemingly power generation dispatch a year or so ago was do e by phoning up the power station and saying “More amperes please Mr Woodbine”.
My understanding is this is being written to an automatic system which isn’t fully commissioned.
Grid battery owners a few years go were irate that they weren’t in the offing to sell power. But that must be resolved by now, since so much money is being invested in it.
Unless that is for non-grid power supply.
I mean negative prices should diminish if there are batteries to charge on it.
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 see the benefit where prices drop to zero or even negative, which is great if you have an EV or something to dump lots of power into. Looking at todays prices they're like 1-3p p/kWh!
But that doesn't last, as the wind dies things start to get back to normal.
The key with the tariff though is to just play the averages and generally avoid high power usage during the peak periods. My average for the last 2 years was around 30% cheaper (p/year) than what I would have paid if I was on a normal energy tariff.
It will be interesting to see whether that trend continues, especially with the state the world has suddenly been thrown into.
I wonder if we'll start to see gimmicks in home appliances for taking advantage of variable prices.
Like for EV charging I assume it's a basic requirement, you simply wouldn't buy a car that didn't let you adjust the charging schedule based on cost.
But what about... Freezers? Maybe there are scenarios where your freezer could drop 20° below its usual temp while prices are low, and thereby avoid running the compressor for several hours while prices are high.
What about a tumble dryer button that says "these clothes are fine to stay wet for up to 8 hours, dry them at the cheapest moment during that window"?
TBH I doubt these things would really pay for themselves but as a consumer I'd still be tempted by the "lol, neat" factor.
Also I assume the local-LLM heads are already finding ways to have their agents do useful work while the GPU can churn tokens for almost-free.
Also makes me think of fun Home Assistant workflows. Like, "when energy is expensive, just try to keep the house between 16-26°. When energy approaches free, I want to live at exactly 20°". (I assume heat pumps also have ways to take advantage of this in more roundabout ways).
I think freezers would definitely be a gimmick as they don't really use that much power.
I can see it being a nice feature for higher-load tasks though, e.g. my dishwasher uses about 1.8kWh for a cycle. On this tariff it's trivial to compute the best start-end time based on the 30 minute price windows, so if the dishwasher could do that it would be pretty sweet. Right now my dishwasher just supports a 3h delay function. I wouldn't mind if my dishwasher had a (local) API you could hit to control its schedule. Sadly this usually comes with some cloud requirement though.
Things like freezers don't take a huge amount of power. It's definitely about things that do space heating/cooling. The traditional approach is to put your electric water heater on a timer. That way you can schedule your hot water use on a consistent schedule but only heat the water at night when you can be sure the rates are lower.
You can basically do that today if you wanted to by buying consumer grade batteries and smart switches. A whole house battery would be better, but it's more expensive to install.
For the tumble drier and dishwasher, those usually come with time delay features. That's usually good enough if your goal is to timeshift a load.
I have a battery for my fridge not for this purpose, but because I'd rather not have a power outage spoil my food.
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Just buy a home battery. Sheesh, there were solutions to problems before LLMs
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I'm following battery prices and you can now get 25kwh for 3.5k. This will be a solved problem a lot sooner for a lot of people.
A heat pump house uses perhaps 40-50kwh in deep winter.
Many homes in Norway has this. Its a smart plug in your fuse box. For me it offsets EV charging untill the electricity is at its cheapest, it also cuts down on heating for the peak hours etc etc.
There are devices to store hot water.
That's a great system. Like so many things, success comes down to implementation.
In California, for example, PG&E will charge you the maximum peak demand prices while simultaneously paying other states to take electricity during the solar duck curve.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880
Are you saying that they don’t let rate payers take advantage of low rates to advantage load shift?
That seems counterproductive and exploitative.
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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?
How are the fixed costs in this? Here in Sweden I have seen a strong trend that as the grid has become more variable and connected to the European grid, a larger portion of the bill becomes fixed. For most part of the year, the fixed costs are now greater than costs that scale with consumption.
Transmission and construction, crewing and maintenance of of thermal power plants (under the name of "reserve energy") cost a lot of money, which in turn becomes fixed grid costs. On top of that you got consumption costs during periods of poor weather, which in combination of high fossil fuel costs means that the consumption prices spikes. The cost of energy during optimal weather conditions is in contrast so low that at this point they can basically just be rounded down to zero.
Chris Norbury, CEO of E.ON UK said:
"Some of the modelling we have suggests that you could get to a position by 2030 where if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be the same as where they are today because of the increase in non-commodity costs."
Fixed costs are enormous and are increasingly driven by paying for the CFDs that back up the economics of wind. The CFD scheme allows wind producers to de-risk from market prices by locking in a fixed price with the government who then recover this from bills.
So, yes you get to enjoy low variable costs when it's windy, but you pay for the priviledge year round.
I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy.
Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.
....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 that the price of electricty is dictated by gas so maybe decoupling that will help - but that probably has complications with balancing the grid.
The tariff I'm on (Octopus Agile) suits me as I WFH, have an EV and it's just me living in the house, I can move my usage outside of hte peak periods quite easily and I built a website to help me find the cheapest charging periods for my car based on the prices for the next day. The other day my average unit rate was like 2p per/kWh and I dumped like 30kWh into my car lol
Yes - the wholesale price of electricity can sometimes be very low (or negative), particularly when there is a lot of wind. And some tariffs pass that on to consumers. But I don't see how it works at scale.
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 :(
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.
What company are you with for that tariff? Do you have solar panels or something?
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?
Some chargers communicate directly with the energy supplier and charge at the cheaper rates.
You can do this yourself as well with home assistant (if your charger supports it) and some API calls. It's just a matter of telling the charger when to start and stop the charge. The rest of the communication between the charger and the car is some protocol I can't remember the name of.
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.
Could be wrong but I guess it more likely communicates with the charger. The car will always try to draw if it's plugged in, but most chargers can be switched on ("charge") and off ("don't charge") remotely. It's probably quite trivial to have something watch the price of power and on/off as appropriate
My car hits the api for my power company and knows how much charge it needs and plans out its charging schedule, always avoids peak.
No the smart meter communicate with the charger.
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 advantage of the cheap periods you'll generally come out on top. My average unit rate last year was like 16.5p p/kWh whereas the standard tariff was 23-24p, so some nice savings. There's also some risk involved - the price can go up to £1 p/kWh and a few days in winter in 2024 it did that for a short while (around the peak periods) so you have to take on that risk - and obviously being exposed to the world energy markets does mean you get exposure to stuff like wars impacting global markets.
I mean there's nothing stopping you from using lots of power between 4pm-7pm it's just you'll drag that average unit rate up to the point where it's probably not worth it. When I say "use lots of power" I don't mean like I sit in the dark between 4-7pm, it's just I avoid the big ticket power users like ovens, showers, cookers etc
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Not GP but I assume the fixed prices have to be fairly high to account for people using lots of power during peak demand when most people use lots of power?
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> 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 country in the world for household electricity, with billpayers paying twice as much as those in the US.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/britain-paying-highest-e...
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. Nuclear might come next.
Gas generators often have the highest costs, because they have to buy gas to burn, as well as paying a "carbon price" - a charge for emissions.
The wholesale cost is set by the last unit of electricity needed to meet demand from consumers. This means that even if gas only generates 1% of power at a given time, gas will still set the wholesale price.
> 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 designed to generate profit. Norway made a different choice. Equinor is majority state-owned, and Norwegian extraction operates within a framework designed to capture resource rents for public benefit. Britain privatised its way out of that option decades ago in the Thatcher-era and has never seriously revisited it.
Analysis from the University of Oxford[1] found that maximising oil and gas extraction from the North Sea would only save households £16 to £82 per year – and this would rely on tax revenues collected being distributed to households to offset their energy bills.
Dr Anupam Sen, co-author of the analysis, said the idea that “draining” the North Sea would make the UK more energy secure and significantly cut household bills is “sheer fantasy”. “We show that regardless of the remaining lifetime of North Sea oil and gas, a ‘drill baby drill’ approach to extraction would actually cost households more money versus continuing on our path to clean energy.”
The authors stress that savings gained from the clean energy transition are recurring annual reductions in bills which would continue indefinitely, whereas North Sea oil and gas are finite resources that would run out around 2040.
[1] https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/drill-baby-drill-appro...
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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.
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Yeah I'm in the UK and for electricity, I'm on the green Octopus Agile tariff, which tracks the wholesale price updating every 30 mins. Given the abundant green energy today, and peak times between 3-7pm, right this second I'm paying £0.02/kWh, but at 6pm, I'll be charged £0.40/kWh. In the coming months with gas supply reduced, and consumer demand steady, it will have a knock on impact to me given it tracks wholesale cost so I'll have to consider moving off the tariff given I'll be paying more overall.
They aren't orthogonal - the reason that gas is being used is because renewable can't reliably power the grid! If you look at something like https://grid.iamkate.com/ you can see that in the last 24 hours the gas peak is when the wind dies down and the sun isn't shining, around 6-8pm. Happens to be a real price peak at that time. This isn't some weird and unexpected outcome, we've had at least a decade of evidence with this sort of low-wholesale-high-retail price dynamic.
That isn't gas is expensive, it is simply policy that the UK, rather naively, is trying to run their grid 24/7 based on processes that are not available 24/7. That is an expensive trick to try and pull off. Poor people need a way to signal that they won't use electricity in the evening if they want to be able to afford power is my read on the situation. Not very civilised but if that is how the UK approaches reliable cheap energy as a target then it seems the most reasonable outcome.
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This is absolutely correct. HN readers can learn more about the merit order and marginal pricing here: https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/what-does-merit-or...
You can read more about gas markets in the Global Gas Market guide by A115 here: https://a115.co.uk/global-gas-market/ (you can download the PDF guide at the bottom without giving any information)
I've read this before and I don't understand how this doesn't become/is untenable.
Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
Also, this would mean that in order to really bring the price down, gas needs to be taken out as a source. But gas is typically the source that balances the grid because its output can be changed quickly. So price wise, you might get a drop but you would lose your ability to react quickly to fluctuations in demand
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Which, importantly, drives more renewables and storage development because it makes the renewables fantastically profitable to run: near zero cost for you, but paid the price set by gas.
Renewables may be the cheapest at spot values, but there needs to be a way to price in the intermittent nature of the power.
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> 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.
Without mentioning how Contracts for Difference (CfD) works, this is a slightly disingenuous oversimplification.
Well explained, thank you! This is called the marginal price. Many people are not aware of this and are then think renewables are expensive.
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.
Renewables inherently require gas peakers.
Obviously, Electricity is a National Security issue. It's naive to state that the problem is gas prices. Germany is seeing Steel, Automotive, and other hard science companies leave for that very reason.
The strategy should have been to build an energy architecture that reduces prices while being robust against force majeure events.
Electricity pricing in the UK is dictated largely by the price of Gas. This is a good video that goes into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEnFmrgEbWo
Gas is the yang to winds yin. What other dispatchable power source is there that Britain could use?
Whatever the dispatchable power source, it would have to last weeks at a time in the coldest months of the year.
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This is of course linked to the UKs renewable rollout (and to do with detaips around the UKs energy markets leading to gas dictating the price for noe), but completely misses the fact that the UKs spending isn't just spending but investment.
Will be interesting to see in five years time looks like, we could well see a scenario where the UK has abundant cheap electricity being exported to the rest of Europe. Will be interesting to hear what the sceptics holding some American states fossil fuel based grids up as examples think then.
None of this of couse factors in the fact that fossil fuels cannot be sustained if we want a livable planet. Factoring that in, payimg energy bills three times as high would be a good investment, if it protects the world we depend on, in my book at least.
Ember has predictions of future EU cross border electricity flows in 2030 and 2040 and it shows the UK becoming a net exporter:
https://ember-energy.org/data/europe-electricity-interconnec...
Are you arguing causality? Texas generates significant renewables, and has low electricity prices.
Footing the technology development bills as a developed country should. Britain owes the world a lot in terms of fossil fuel contamination too.
> 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.
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I'm sure there's an (un)healthy dose of degrowth to let them hit that 90% number too.
Economic rocket fuel lands in Dover most mornings, it'll balance out. - Ed Miliband 2026 (probably)
These titles are misleading, they always omit the rest of the grid and the final carbon footprint.
In March, the UK emitted 161g CO2/kWh. France did 6 times less CO2/kWh with 2x less renewables !
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/12mo/monthly
The title may be misleading, but IMO not for the reasons you mentioned. "90%" is based on generation right now, live. On the site from the post you can see that for the last day (24h) renewable generation was 66%, for the last week 46%, for the last year 42%. So it's nowhere near 90% renewable in general, but it is 90% at the moment (there's sunlight and good wind). Emissions on the website from the post are lower than on the website you linked - 107 g/kWh for the week, 124 for the year - but I don't know why that is.
Because nuclear. Which is a great 20th century French achievement !
If the EPR2 doesn’t spiral into costing £17.5bn per unit as the UK-PWR has, perhaps we can get them in to “rustle me up a nuclear power station” or two, in the words of Tony Blair.
https://youtu.be/Gq-l07XmQVc
Just needs a bit of "4be2be4be2be", we can do that!
The subsidies for the EPR2 fleet is a 10 euro cents per kWh CFD and interest free loans. With the first reactor coming online in 2038 at the earliest.
That sums up towards 20 cents per kWh in total.
It’s an absolutely horrifyingly expensive boondoggle before they have even started, and it won’t deliver any electricity in the relevant timeframes for electrifying industry and society.
On top of this EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for their existing paid off nuclear fleet. Let alone new builds.
And that is France which has been extremely protectionistic shielding their nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and even then its already leaking in on pure economics.
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France has an amazingly developed grid, with a lot of nuclear. But I think there's a risk of seeing grid make ups as "one size fits all". Norway and Sweden do well with huge amounts of hydro storage, but few countries have the geography for that level of hydro. Similarly, the UK has an abundance of offshore wind (especially in Scotland), so further developing that (rather than focusing heavily on nuclear because it works in France) is by no means a bad idea.
Hydro is great for long term storage, but the potential is too small and sparse on the globe to be a scalable solution.
France has much more nuclear. You can argue that is better but even if you agree it would take decades to get there.
South Korea builds nuclear power plants in five years.
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That's only because that chart isn't bookkeeping nuclear as renewable, which is misleading at best.
Why would you classify nuclear as renewable? You can say it's clean energy but it's not renewable.
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Yet still it costs several pounds a day to heat your home in winter. People are going back to log burners. I've never seen so much coal/wood sold at the supermarkets during winter. I've got some electric blankets which is great but really energy costs seem to be spiralling.
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 for EV charging at night. We are paying 26 cents (£0.20) except for 4-9PM when it’s 59 cents (£0.44). Plus a monthly base charge which they just increased.
Those answers won't be too helpful. We have very high bills compared internationally, due to a difficult-to-explain quirk (pay-as-clear marginal pricing) where all electricity is charged to the customer at the highest rate possible at that moment. So wind may cost 0.05 pkwh and be freely available but if gas is being utilised anywhere else in the grid at a cost of eg. 0.45 then everybody gets charged 0.45 pkwh, even for the wind energy.
Its a messed up system which means often pay the highest in Europe, without even helping that much towards the tax coffers. But reform of this system does seem to be gaining a bit of political momentum.
Most of the day 28p/kwh, 1-5am 17p/kwh, 4-7pm 39p/kwh.
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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This is great. Yes, plenty of challenges around this remain but the direction of travel is hugely positive.
Bit more advances in grid scale storage, bit more interconnects and this looks real good
Related - world-wide map of energy generation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553165
Today is abnormally windy in the north of the country, and sunny, so this is not unexpected.
By their own data, today is about 18GW for wind, and this time last week it was 3GW.
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!
Yes, if you count the Drax power plant as renewable, sure.
If you add to that deindustrialization and buying everything from abroad and not caring where that energy comes from, it’s super easy.
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 tracked against Drax.
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Drax isn't included. There's even a specific note about this next to "Biomass" on the page.
Good thing they won't be needing any of that LNG from the Gulf.
and still somehow pay tons for "cheap" green electricity
Somehow? It’s a well established and publicised fact that it’s due to the price of gas. It’s so well established that anyone posting a comment here about the high price of electricity without mentioning it has an ulterior motive.
It's also widely misunderstood. Just because the spot price of electricity is set by the price of gas doesn’t mean the consumer pays that price for all of their electricity.
A lot of wind and solar are on Contracts for Difference. That means when market prices go above the agreed level, the generator pays the difference back through the scheme, which reduces supplier costs rather than the generator simply keeping the whole windfall.
This is particularly relevant when e.g. the price of gas goes way up due to the Iran war, it doesn't mean that the consumer ends up paying more for the energy from wind
So who's working on fixing it? It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature. Meanwhile you have folks seeing these three things together:
- England is 90% renewables
- Renewables are a really cheap source of energy.
- England has very high energy prices.
And the obvious conclusion is that someone is lying. It's eroding support for renewables among those that don't have time to investigate how or why the spot price of gas sets the overall energy price.
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It's not only the price of gas but also the price of the co2 emissions. I'm really surprised the uk didn't get rid of it when they left the eu. It's one of the most stupid things possible. It only makes everything more expensive.
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If you’ve got even a passing interest in the UK energy market you’d know this is because of the wholesale price of gas, not the actual wholesale cost of solar and wind.
If you really want to pay less for green energy, which is cheap when it’s plentiful (like anything) get on a variable tariff and install some storage.
how does the wholesale price of gas explain how the UK is the most expensive in the world/europe?
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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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Almost every normal person sees this through the eyes of the consumer because paying the electric bill is their primary interaction with the issue. What you're describing is politically a tough sell.
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This is a 'lawyer-worded' headline. I am an enormous fan of renewables, I am an electrical engineer who designs control systems for renewables exclusively. My career depends on renewables.
Headlines like this do nobody any favors. The problem with renewables is that you cannot run a grid on renewables alone. Many days will have an abundant oversupply, like the day shown. Many days will not. Consumers are not tolerant of brownouts in the west. We need pump storage hydro, we need massive improvements to the transmission system, and we need battery storage plants (in that order).
Its fine to celebrate days of high renewable GW output, but people get out the GW Bush 'mission accomplished' banners a little early. The generation is the cheap and easy part. The rest is expensive and slow and needs way more focus than it's getting if we ever want to make progress in the west (China is already figuring it out)
For those of us outside of Britain (i.e. 98% of us?) the message here isn't "mission accomplished" -- it's "Yes it's possible"
Well, in the sense that it's possible to be eating zero calories in the time between meals. You still need the meals. If you're just looking at brief snapshots, it doesn't tell you much.
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Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?
I'm hoping for some other technology apart from pumped hydro or batteries to be used for capturing surplus renewable energy for later use. It's unfortunate that hydrogen seems to be too complex to handle at these scales, it'd be utopian if it wasn't and the excess of renewables could be transformed into hydrogen for use in turbines instead of nat gas...
> Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?
Scotland seems to be a perfect place for pumped storage. I see that UK has 4 pumped storage stations, 2 in Wales, 2 in Scotland. But Scotland being quite far from most of UK's population may not be ideal if we're talking about supporting the whole country with pumped storage. It would be like 600km to the south of England.
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Iron air batteries sound promising
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Pumped hydro needs a hill to pump up. That's why I said storage and transmission. We are laughably bad at moving power from where it is made (or stored) to where it is used and the worst part is it's not even a problem of science or engineering. We have it all figured out!
It's purely a problem of political will.
The headline is perfectly accurate… I’d say what you’re saying is a kind of whataboutism about stuff everybody knows…
Milestones like the one here are notable and interesting to most people!
What about tonight?
11am, nicely sunny-ish and quite windy here... and so 65% wind, 25% solar.
Really cool! Would be nice to have some explanatory legends at some locations, like for transfers (eg "Positive when GB -> x, negative when x -> GB")
9.4% is Gas + Biomass (not clean)
But there’s a generation surplus and export of +13.4%!
Why don't they count pumped storage and batteries as renewable?
Because they’re not generation, they’re storage. You need to charge them and that charge can come from any source.
They are storage. They should count as neither.
Yes, because its windy today
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If by renewables you mean lumber from Canada, then sure.
I assume you are referring to Drax? That should come under biomass, which is 2.5% currently. I don't think the practice is great but that's clearly not where the energy is coming from. 87.7% of UK energy generation at this moment is coming from solar and wind.
Sorry, what are you implying here? That people burn lumber from Canada to heat their homes?
They’re referring to the source of wood pellets for the Drax power plant i.e. this https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/26/drax-pow...
The landscape has been destroyed by wind turbines, and energy prices are higher than ever. lose lose.
It’s a bit more complex than that. Octopus do a deal where you can lease a car and get the energy for it for free provided you agree to have it plugged in > x hrs a month. My read on that is that the cost of balancing the grid is greater than the cost of generating power. So grid is expensive, but power is cheap.
> The landscape has been destroyed by wind turbines
What? Have you even been to the UK?
> energy prices are higher than ever
Because electricity prices are tied to gas prices (not to mention that wars near countries that export gas don't help bringing prices down).
And thats not how good renewables are- thats how deindustrialized britain has become. And deindustrialization leads to debt slavery - and debt slavery either leads to passing on that bitter chalice to others (empire) or to becoming a colony.
> deindustrialization leads to debt slavery
Ok I’ll bite — how? Surely not because manufacturing is the only way to create value?
As you denindustrialize, your normal working class population rebells - demanding its lifestyle to remain untouched- thus subsidized by the state. So the state either prints money costing the world (us-model) or it prints money- costing the future. As this happens and future generations get poorer- the idea to lend from foreign "investors" which then take over your country becomes the default solution - until you are a debt colony, owned by those lending you money.
They downvote you because this website calls itself progressive but it loves offshoring and basically anything that hurts the working class.