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Bittersweet. Glad to be moving away from coal, but the lack of serious investment in anything but wind energy has left the UK with the highest electricity pric

Bittersweet. Glad to be moving away from coal, but the lack of serious investment in anything but wind energy has left the UK with the highest electricity prices in the developed world, factories and industry closing their doors, the most vulnerable in society choosing between heating or eating and a very real prospect of blackouts this winter. We dreamed of a future of energy abundance, almost too cheap to meter. We have the technology in nuclear to do just that and perhaps we will one day. So celebrate Britain turning off 500MW of emergency buffer supply and try your best to ignore the 50GW of coal power that China brought online in the 12 months of 2023 alone.

inferiorhuman 2y ago
left the UK with the highest electricity prices in the developed world https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/news/new-energy-price-cap-level-october-december-2024-starts-today https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/news/new-energy-price-cap-level-oct... Wha? Fair play if you think the US is not a developed country, but £0.255/kWh is towards the lower end of what electricity costs in California. Hawaii is at or above those rates.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  0.25 GBP per kWh ($0.33) is at the top end of prices on this list: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
  - inferiorhuman 2y ago
    https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/... https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/documents/billing_and_payment/rates/effective_rate_summary/efs_2024_09.pdf https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/documents/billing_and_payme... I'm pretty sure SDGE (San Diego) rates are higher than PG&E across the board, but I'm too lazy to look it up since PG&E covers a huge swath of California and is already eyewateringly expensive.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      $0.45/kwh for me, but I expect this will go up because California mandated income based pricing for electricity. At this rate, wont be long before we have to bring a copy of our w-2 to the super market so that the cashier can figure out the price of groceries.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  Neither California or Hawaii are good metrics to compare against. California is a mess of self inflicted high costs, and Hawaii is too small to have any industry and too far away from anything for cheap transporting of goods. My own electric rate in the middle-north continental US is only a third of the £0.255/kWh rate.
  - inferiorhuman 2y ago
    No, they're both perfect. The comment I was responding to put forth the idea that the UK is an outlier when it's not far off from the cost in big chunks of the US. What's going on in California is no more self-inflicted than the UK choosing to ditch coal or choosing to be heavily reliant on Russian gas.
    - zdragnar 2y ago
      California doesn't rely on Russian gas, and still has one (small) coal power plant. Even so, cross the border into Oregon and their rates are half... CA is literally double the national average price in the US. CA makes up about 11% of the US population. So, just short of 90% of the country pays half of what they do. CA is a big place, but simply is not representative of the country as a whole. They are, in fact, an outlier in many metrics.
      - inferiorhuman 2y ago
        … so? How is any of that relevant? I wasn't comparing the whole country to the UK, I was comparing California to the UK. There are more people in California than in a number of developed countries (e.g. Netherlands, Portugal, Taiwan, Singapore). PG&E alone provides electricity to more people (16 million across 5.5 million accounts) than the entire population of New England (15 million). California as a single market is an entirely valid comparison.
        zdragnar 2y ago
        You said Wha? Fair play if you think the US is not a developed country California and Hawaii are both extreme outliers in the US, and aside from gasoline prices in California, both are on the extreme end of outliers in comparing to Europe on most metrics as well. Neither are good comparisons for what is "normal"... The only thing the comparison does is prove that the UK has high energy prices.
- Kognito 2y ago
  I was referring to this article which quotes the IEA for industrial energy costs at around $0.085/kWh, versus $0.34/kWh in the UK. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/26/britain-burdened-most-expensive-electricity-prices-in-world/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/26/britain-burd...
  - inferiorhuman 2y ago
    https://www.pge.com/tariffs/en/rate-information/electric-rates.html https://www.pge.com/tariffs/en/rate-information/electric-rat... PG&E's non-residential rates aren't that much cheaper than their residential rates. The rate schedules are comically complex so I can't give you insight into what the differences are, but they're showing average rates of $0.42/kWh (A-1, Commercial), $0.19–$0.32/kWh (E-20, Industrial), $0.20–$0.32/kWh (B-20, Industrial), $0.51/kWh (AG-1A, Agricultural), etc., etc. As was pointed out by another commenter California and Hawaii are outliers, but then again so is Texas (where the uncapped market rate plans socked people with $9,000/month residential bills). Thing is both Texas and California are huge markets, so while parts of the US are much cheaper, parts of the US that are each larger than the UK are quite a bit more expensive. Honestly I had no idea how pricey the non-residential plans are and I feel like there are almost certainly incentives that would cut the net cost significantly.
DanielBryars 2y ago
I'm curious, was is profitable? I don't mean to diminish other factors for keeping it alive, just wondering?
- benrutter 2y ago
  I don't know for sure, but I'd guess so. Use of coal as an energy source is fairly commonplace. Germany is an example of a country where coal makes up a huge make up of it's power. It's probably becoming less profitable though- there aren't a lot of guarantees because coal takes a long time to start up, and the UKs energy price is volatile due to the ammount of wind energy in the system. Probably a reason why natural gas continues to be a fossil fuel with a lot of use in the UK. It's very quick to turn on and off at times when wind is low/high.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    Last year Germany had more power from wind (32%) than coal (28%). The UK (or EU?) introduced air pollution limits and carbon emission taxes. That made coal power unprofitable. Ratcliffe had a supplemental income as an emergency producer of power, which presumably left it profitable, but it is no longer needed for that.
- TechnicalVault 2y ago
  Less profitable than a comparable gas turbine because it couldn't perform the same grid role of peaker plants. Make no mistake it was gas which killed coal here not wind. A coal plant even with all of the modern upgrades is and always has been happiest as a baseload generator. It takes about 4-6 hours for a coal plant to come up from cold start, compared to about 5 mins for a gas peaker plant. This means you can use it for planned/predicted grid peaks but you'll have to run during some unprofitable times to do so. Essentially coal has the same problem as wind, it's producing at the wrong times. If you want it to be really profitable you need pumped storage and batteries to hold that energy for peaks, something we're still short of in the UK.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
Wind power is not to blame for the high price of electricity in Britain. Some of the wind power is being purchased at 4p/kWh. Commodities are priced at the margin, and the marginal price in the UK is imported liquified gas.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  If (possibly when, as they are looking into it now) the UK moves to zonal pricing, Scotland will have the cheapest electricity in Europe, due to all the wind. All the other zones would reduce in price too. Currently you get some oddities like France buying cheap wind from Scotland and since it can't get delivered through bottlenecks, gas plants in England supplying the power. The cost of this gas is then the source of headlines about how expensive wind backup is, rather than headlines about why Scotland has mysteriously more cheap electricity than England, where onshore wind was effectively banned, and the problems caused by different areas having different amounts of cheap electricity and a single market price.
- roenxi 2y ago
  I wouldn't blame wind, but from the sidelines one would expect shutting down all the coal plants is linked to the high cost situation.
- phil21 2y ago
  You can’t ignore the high prices when the wind doesn’t blow while saying the low prices when there is an excess of production is the true cost. This is called cherry picking. The cost of intermittent power sources includes the dirty fossil fuel peaker plants built and ran to back them. Think of them as batteries. Intermittent power sources more or less are financial engineering parasites to the grid at this point. It could be fixed but no one has the political will to do so. Eventually you run out of other people’s power and the chickens come home to roost. The most obvious investment I’ve made in the past 15 years was natural gas. Until chemical battery storage catches up (doubtful) or there is a return to rationality in this space I expect the party to continue. I hate it. I think solar and wind are great technologies that are currently horrifically misused by folks getting rich off the backs of regular people.
seadan83 2y ago
I don't think any of your claims are supported by available data. Would you be able to provide some citations to give evidence for what you say? Going through point by point: > has left the UK with the highest electricity prices in the developed world Since when? As of 2023, high, but not highest. [1] > factories and industry closing their doors Could you provide evidence that factories and industry are actually on the decline in the UK? Second, can you provide evidence it is related to energy prices? It seems the data contradicts this type of correlation [2]. Energy prices spiked in 2021 and are now down, to very similar levels as they were over the last decade. > the most vulnerable in society choosing between heating or eating Citations needed, and also to demonstrate that this is a new phenomenon. Considering energy prices are lower in the UK than recently, this decision would not be due to an increase in energy prices. > very real prospect of blackouts this winter. According to [3]: " The risk of blackouts in Britain will be lower this winter as new gas generation capacity and greater electricity imports from Europe should ensure a larger buffer against potential shortages" > We dreamed of a future of energy abundance, almost too cheap to meter Who is we? Was this a party platform? Propaganda? Just something you were lead to believe? > We have the technology in nuclear to do just that and perhaps we will one day. First claim is not supported. Is it possible to actually produce that much nuclear energy. Also, energy markets are global. Excess energy is sold, it is not necessarily divided out locally for free. Further, stupid cheap energy would create it's own demand, migration of energy usages. > So celebrate Britain turning off 500MW of emergency buffer supply A single plant is the buffer supply? > ignore the 50GW of coal power that China brought online in the 12 months of 2023 alone. That is a what-about-ism ‐----- [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/589765/average-electricity-prices-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/589765/average-electrici... [3] https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/energy/article/blackout-risk-lower-this-winter-says-national-grid-20l652p52 https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/energy/article/black...
- scrlk 2y ago
  I believe the claims may be based off of the recently published Foundations essay: https://ukfoundations.co/ https://ukfoundations.co/ Specifically, the "Britain: the first energy superpower" section: https://ukfoundations.co/#footnote-source-6 https://ukfoundations.co/#footnote-source-6
giarc 2y ago
How much is a result of Brexit and losing trade agreement with Europe?
- Kognito 2y ago
  More or less none. Energy prices are a domestic mismanagement issue and pre-date the Brexit situation, unfortunately.
  - giarc 2y ago
    No I meant the comment about businesses and factories shutting down.
ViewTrick1002 2y ago
China is replacing old inefficient coal plants with modern ones and the capacity factors are lowering. 2024 was the breaking point where more renewables was built than expected grid expansion and emissions are therefore expected to decline. Nuclear power simply is too expensive. The Hinkley Point C CFD simply is insane and Sizewell C isn’t looking any better.

inferiorhuman 2y ago

left the UK with the highest electricity prices in the developed world https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/news/new-energy-price-cap-level-october-december-2024-starts-today https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/news/new-energy-price-cap-level-oct... Wha? Fair play if you think the US is not a developed country, but £0.255/kWh is towards the lower end of what electricity costs in California. Hawaii is at or above those rates.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
0.25 GBP per kWh ($0.33) is at the top end of prices on this list: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
- inferiorhuman 2y ago
  https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/... https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/documents/billing_and_payment/rates/effective_rate_summary/efs_2024_09.pdf https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/documents/billing_and_payme... I'm pretty sure SDGE (San Diego) rates are higher than PG&E across the board, but I'm too lazy to look it up since PG&E covers a huge swath of California and is already eyewateringly expensive.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    $0.45/kwh for me, but I expect this will go up because California mandated income based pricing for electricity. At this rate, wont be long before we have to bring a copy of our w-2 to the super market so that the cashier can figure out the price of groceries.
zdragnar 2y ago
Neither California or Hawaii are good metrics to compare against. California is a mess of self inflicted high costs, and Hawaii is too small to have any industry and too far away from anything for cheap transporting of goods. My own electric rate in the middle-north continental US is only a third of the £0.255/kWh rate.
- inferiorhuman 2y ago
  No, they're both perfect. The comment I was responding to put forth the idea that the UK is an outlier when it's not far off from the cost in big chunks of the US. What's going on in California is no more self-inflicted than the UK choosing to ditch coal or choosing to be heavily reliant on Russian gas.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    California doesn't rely on Russian gas, and still has one (small) coal power plant. Even so, cross the border into Oregon and their rates are half... CA is literally double the national average price in the US. CA makes up about 11% of the US population. So, just short of 90% of the country pays half of what they do. CA is a big place, but simply is not representative of the country as a whole. They are, in fact, an outlier in many metrics.
    - inferiorhuman 2y ago
      … so? How is any of that relevant? I wasn't comparing the whole country to the UK, I was comparing California to the UK. There are more people in California than in a number of developed countries (e.g. Netherlands, Portugal, Taiwan, Singapore). PG&E alone provides electricity to more people (16 million across 5.5 million accounts) than the entire population of New England (15 million). California as a single market is an entirely valid comparison.
      - zdragnar 2y ago
        You said Wha? Fair play if you think the US is not a developed country California and Hawaii are both extreme outliers in the US, and aside from gasoline prices in California, both are on the extreme end of outliers in comparing to Europe on most metrics as well. Neither are good comparisons for what is "normal"... The only thing the comparison does is prove that the UK has high energy prices.
Kognito 2y ago
I was referring to this article which quotes the IEA for industrial energy costs at around $0.085/kWh, versus $0.34/kWh in the UK. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/26/britain-burdened-most-expensive-electricity-prices-in-world/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/26/britain-burd...
- inferiorhuman 2y ago
  https://www.pge.com/tariffs/en/rate-information/electric-rates.html https://www.pge.com/tariffs/en/rate-information/electric-rat... PG&E's non-residential rates aren't that much cheaper than their residential rates. The rate schedules are comically complex so I can't give you insight into what the differences are, but they're showing average rates of $0.42/kWh (A-1, Commercial), $0.19–$0.32/kWh (E-20, Industrial), $0.20–$0.32/kWh (B-20, Industrial), $0.51/kWh (AG-1A, Agricultural), etc., etc. As was pointed out by another commenter California and Hawaii are outliers, but then again so is Texas (where the uncapped market rate plans socked people with $9,000/month residential bills). Thing is both Texas and California are huge markets, so while parts of the US are much cheaper, parts of the US that are each larger than the UK are quite a bit more expensive. Honestly I had no idea how pricey the non-residential plans are and I feel like there are almost certainly incentives that would cut the net cost significantly.

DanielBryars 2y ago

I'm curious, was is profitable? I don't mean to diminish other factors for keeping it alive, just wondering?

benrutter 2y ago
I don't know for sure, but I'd guess so. Use of coal as an energy source is fairly commonplace. Germany is an example of a country where coal makes up a huge make up of it's power. It's probably becoming less profitable though- there aren't a lot of guarantees because coal takes a long time to start up, and the UKs energy price is volatile due to the ammount of wind energy in the system. Probably a reason why natural gas continues to be a fossil fuel with a lot of use in the UK. It's very quick to turn on and off at times when wind is low/high.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  Last year Germany had more power from wind (32%) than coal (28%). The UK (or EU?) introduced air pollution limits and carbon emission taxes. That made coal power unprofitable. Ratcliffe had a supplemental income as an emergency producer of power, which presumably left it profitable, but it is no longer needed for that.
TechnicalVault 2y ago
Less profitable than a comparable gas turbine because it couldn't perform the same grid role of peaker plants. Make no mistake it was gas which killed coal here not wind. A coal plant even with all of the modern upgrades is and always has been happiest as a baseload generator. It takes about 4-6 hours for a coal plant to come up from cold start, compared to about 5 mins for a gas peaker plant. This means you can use it for planned/predicted grid peaks but you'll have to run during some unprofitable times to do so. Essentially coal has the same problem as wind, it's producing at the wrong times. If you want it to be really profitable you need pumped storage and batteries to hold that energy for peaks, something we're still short of in the UK.

bryanlarsen 2y ago

Wind power is not to blame for the high price of electricity in Britain. Some of the wind power is being purchased at 4p/kWh. Commodities are priced at the margin, and the marginal price in the UK is imported liquified gas.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago
If (possibly when, as they are looking into it now) the UK moves to zonal pricing, Scotland will have the cheapest electricity in Europe, due to all the wind. All the other zones would reduce in price too. Currently you get some oddities like France buying cheap wind from Scotland and since it can't get delivered through bottlenecks, gas plants in England supplying the power. The cost of this gas is then the source of headlines about how expensive wind backup is, rather than headlines about why Scotland has mysteriously more cheap electricity than England, where onshore wind was effectively banned, and the problems caused by different areas having different amounts of cheap electricity and a single market price.
roenxi 2y ago
I wouldn't blame wind, but from the sidelines one would expect shutting down all the coal plants is linked to the high cost situation.
phil21 2y ago
You can’t ignore the high prices when the wind doesn’t blow while saying the low prices when there is an excess of production is the true cost. This is called cherry picking. The cost of intermittent power sources includes the dirty fossil fuel peaker plants built and ran to back them. Think of them as batteries. Intermittent power sources more or less are financial engineering parasites to the grid at this point. It could be fixed but no one has the political will to do so. Eventually you run out of other people’s power and the chickens come home to roost. The most obvious investment I’ve made in the past 15 years was natural gas. Until chemical battery storage catches up (doubtful) or there is a return to rationality in this space I expect the party to continue. I hate it. I think solar and wind are great technologies that are currently horrifically misused by folks getting rich off the backs of regular people.

seadan83 2y ago

I don't think any of your claims are supported by available data. Would you be able to provide some citations to give evidence for what you say? Going through point by point: > has left the UK with the highest electricity prices in the developed world Since when? As of 2023, high, but not highest. [1] > factories and industry closing their doors Could you provide evidence that factories and industry are actually on the decline in the UK? Second, can you provide evidence it is related to energy prices? It seems the data contradicts this type of correlation [2]. Energy prices spiked in 2021 and are now down, to very similar levels as they were over the last decade. > the most vulnerable in society choosing between heating or eating Citations needed, and also to demonstrate that this is a new phenomenon. Considering energy prices are lower in the UK than recently, this decision would not be due to an increase in energy prices. > very real prospect of blackouts this winter. According to [3]: " The risk of blackouts in Britain will be lower this winter as new gas generation capacity and greater electricity imports from Europe should ensure a larger buffer against potential shortages" > We dreamed of a future of energy abundance, almost too cheap to meter Who is we? Was this a party platform? Propaganda? Just something you were lead to believe? > We have the technology in nuclear to do just that and perhaps we will one day. First claim is not supported. Is it possible to actually produce that much nuclear energy. Also, energy markets are global. Excess energy is sold, it is not necessarily divided out locally for free. Further, stupid cheap energy would create it's own demand, migration of energy usages. > So celebrate Britain turning off 500MW of emergency buffer supply A single plant is the buffer supply? > ignore the 50GW of coal power that China brought online in the 12 months of 2023 alone. That is a what-about-ism ‐----- [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/589765/average-electricity-prices-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/589765/average-electrici... [3] https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/energy/article/blackout-risk-lower-this-winter-says-national-grid-20l652p52 https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/energy/article/black...

scrlk 2y ago
I believe the claims may be based off of the recently published Foundations essay: https://ukfoundations.co/ https://ukfoundations.co/ Specifically, the "Britain: the first energy superpower" section: https://ukfoundations.co/#footnote-source-6 https://ukfoundations.co/#footnote-source-6

giarc 2y ago

How much is a result of Brexit and losing trade agreement with Europe?

Kognito 2y ago
More or less none. Energy prices are a domestic mismanagement issue and pre-date the Brexit situation, unfortunately.
- giarc 2y ago
  No I meant the comment about businesses and factories shutting down.

ViewTrick1002 2y ago

China is replacing old inefficient coal plants with modern ones and the capacity factors are lowering. 2024 was the breaking point where more renewables was built than expected grid expansion and emissions are therefore expected to decline. Nuclear power simply is too expensive. The Hinkley Point C CFD simply is insane and Sizewell C isn’t looking any better.