Comment by jordand

> grid-scale energy storage

This is currently called natural gas. You store it in the ground, and in "day tanks" on land connected to pipes.

Nuclear can also be seen in the same way in relation to renewables.

Batteries are currently much further than I ever thought possible, but still nowhere close to being cost effective enough for most areas.

If you forced every solar or wind installation to have at least 48 hours of nameplate capacity in storage, you would get closer to the true cost of deploying renewables. Right now there is a whole lot of cherry picking going on, where investors are taking the profitable easy stuff, collecting subsidies, and then making the hard expensive stuff someone else's problem.

Right now battery deployments cover the few hour duck curve at best, because that's the only profitable way to deploy them. Hopefully the trend continues though!

Come on bro...next election, it will be different this time.

Tories do not back the free market. You said it yourself, the two parties are the same. Elections are irrelevant, both political parties pander towards orthogonal groups of voters, they tell them they are different, and they get in government and will do the same thing. Reform will do the same thing.

Also, the characterisation of what the government is able to do is extremely inconsistent. Able to lock down the whole country by fiat? Happened in an afternoon. Able to approve a 2-bed house twenty miles away from anyone? Sorry mate, need 26 forms, planning authority, need solar panels, need heat pump, etc. One of the big issues the UK has is with the understanding of government, it is the most bizarre mix of extreme libertarianism and extreme authoritarianism. It is a country where police will arrest someone from criticising a politician or the police AND a country where the police are unable to investigate almost all crimes (fraud investigations are outsourced to banks and private companies but there is action at multiple layers of government to control what happens on Twitter).

Storage is not possible. Everyone knows this. What game is being played here? Which other medium-sized country has large amounts of renewables with as much storage as we require. Electricity prices are already ruinously expensive. The solution is simple: do the stuff that works, that is it. The UK is a tale in being unable to do simple things that work.

You don't understand what a subsidy is. Offshore wind subsidies are taken out of electricity bills, not the price. The price you are seeing does not include the subsidy.

The reason why Hinkley Point is expensive is completely solvable. The reason why it is expensive is because it is supposed to be expensive, that is the purpose. An A road near me has required two lanes, so far they have spent near £100m over twenty years and have not built anything. The basic premise of the UK political system is that people have no idea what the price of anything should be because it is all a political fiction.

When the costing was done for Hinkley 10 years ago the price was going to be, iirc, something like 50% above the price of gas which was at record lows. This was regarded as extremely expensive...electricity prices are up multiples and multiples since then. Since then, you have had armies of lawyers, consultants, lobbyists, planners working on the project full-time...and you are asking why it is expensive? Thinking this requires knowing so little about how much nuclear costs around the world and having literally zero idea about infra projects work in the UK (spoiler: there is massive corruption at almost every level, tens of billions in graft every year).

Yes, there are massive onshore reserves. The Tory government that has been accused on here of pimping the environment immediately banned all exploration.

There is are also two relatively big offshore fields that were taken to a very late stage of development and then stopped because of opposition by local government.

I would research exactly how big the gap is with other countries (and, remember, retail price is subsidised). The Cameron government made the active decision to order companies to shut down power plants with no plans for replacement. To be clear, nothing about energy...this is jut electricity provision. There was no economic incentive, that is why tens of billions were given to energy companies to produce non-economic, expensive power with guaranteed payments.

There was some research done last year iirc: if the UK paid zero for gas, the price of electricity would not stop rising because of the government intervention.

It is reasonable that you assume something rational must be going on here. But that model does not apply in the UK. Politics took over from economics a long time ago.

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.

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...).