5 ms·

Time to decouple the UK Electricity price from Gas so we can actually reap the benefits of this as a consumer.

trebligdivad 1y ago
It effectively decouples for any period when no gas is needed; so if those batteries let you turn off the gas generators for an hour the price decouples from gas.
- u02sgb 1y ago
  Think OP is taking about UK bills which are coupled too the cost of gas for historical reasons. Which needs to change in my view too.
  - trebligdivad 1y ago
    Right - but if we start getting a useful amount of time when the grid doesn't need any gas, the amount of coupling should start to drop off.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
      Solving the engineering challenges of "useful amount of time when the grid doesn't need any gas" without also digging into why the UK's energy pricing structure is such an outlier at the expense of consumers, seem a bit like one of those doomed attempts to solve a social issue by purely technical means.
      - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
        Pretty much all of europe runs on marginal cost electricity. The UK was just extra stupid by banning nearly all construction of onshore wind.
        SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
        While that is a slightly different cause, "banning nearly all construction of onshore wind" was and is a social issue. It's culture and politics, not engineering.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    They aren't per se coupled to gas. Here's roughly how it works: We work in half hours, 48 of them per day. If you're a very large user (e.g maybe you're a factory which makes cars), or if you choose to do this at home, you can be metered in half hours and billed this way. In advance of the half hour, we guess how much power we might need. 9pm here soon, I reckon 30GW per the British mainland. Now we run an auction. Everybody who can make power from 9pm to 9:30 bids, saying how much they'd accept to make power Then, starting from the lowest bids, we add bidders up to 30GW of power, those people will make our 30GW of electricity, and we pay all of them the same price, that price is last bid needed to meet our 30GW goal. This is often a closed cycle gas turbine because: 1. There are fucking shitloads of them. Probably 35GW nameplate, maybe 40GW, that is a lot of power generation. More than any other single type (Wind can deliver about 20GW to the grid, solar is smaller, nuclear is much smaller, storage also smaller even if you count it as generation which it technically is not) 2. They are (almost, maintenance is necessary) always willing to run, for a price. Rain or shine, night or day, if there is gas at any price they can charge that price plus a little profit to make it into electricity. Only question is if you'll pay For a typical home tariff the "supplier" you're paying has guessed that on average they'll make a healthy profit if they charge you say 24p per kWh plus standing. They pay that half-hourly price, if they guessed badly wrong and can't cover the difference they go bankrupt, which sucks for the government who are on the hook to ensure you still get electricity anyway. So, the de-coupling would happen automatically if the current system stayed the same but you added a lot of cheap storage and enough wind power that on average the country was mostly wind powered. Or indeed nukes or solar if somehow this country built loads of nuke stations or got improbably sunnier.
jacquesm 1y ago
That will never happen. They'll use that excuse until the very last gas powered plant is alive and then there will immediately be some other reason why energy prices have to stay the way they are.
- octo888 1y ago
  Precisely this!
ZeroGravitas 1y ago
The only sensible way to do this I've heard is to roll out more renewables faster and so burn less gas. Is there some other plans you support?
- skippyboxedhero 1y ago
  Rolling out more renewables faster will mean more reliance on gas. I am not sure how people still don't realise this after ten years of doing this and energy prices going up non-stop.
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    At this point, there's not that much other non-renewable generation on the UK grid, so expanding renewables will reduce the impact of gas on prices (though it'll likely be non-linear).
    - spacebanana7 1y ago
      Gas complements renewables really well because gas can readily be tapped “on-demand” whilst renewables can only be tapped “on supply”. It’s relatively easy to turn off gas when renewables are supplying energy to the grid at near zero cost marginal cost. But also easy to turn on gas when the renewables aren’t supplying energy, or when demand spikes in a manner uncorrelated to renewable generation. Batteries are a more elegant solution long term, of course.
      - pydry 1y ago
        Gas complements everything well. It's relatively cheap, easy to store power in large amounts and completely dispatchable. Nothing else can do all 3. Batteries work well for short term day-to-day storage but they're impossibly expensive for seasonal storage which we will need a solution for for the last ~5-10% of decarbonization. Probably the only way to fully decarbonize will eventually be to synthesize gas.
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
boredpudding 1y ago
Does the UK not have an option for hourly-pricing? That's usually where as a consumer you can have the most gains. In the summer, with solar panels, my energy bill is negative (in The Netherlands)
- Kognito 1y ago
  We do, but I can’t imagine it’s hugely popular. Only a few of the smaller suppliers offer it AFAIK.
  - OJFord 1y ago
    Octopus is the largest UK energy supplier, and offers half-hourly billing ('Agile').
- 0rdinal 1y ago
  Some suppliers (e.g., Octopus Energy) offer half-hourly tariffs whose rates track the day-ahead wholesale market and are published daily. Prices usually fall when supply is abundant (e.g., windy/sunny periods) Day ahead pricing: https://agileprices.co.uk/ https://agileprices.co.uk/ National grid supply/demand and energy mix: https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/
- rcxdude 1y ago
  Yes, but the hourly price is still largely set by gas, because it's still a minority of the time where renewables are supplying 100% of the grid.
- Havoc 1y ago
  The UK has a stupid system where the pricing for everything is determined by the most expensive thing in the mix: >The UK’s electricity market operates using a system known as “marginal pricing”. This means that all of the power plants running in each half-hour period are paid the same price, set by the final generator that has to switch on to meet demand, which is known as the “marginal” unit. i.e. if you have 99 units of solar but have 100 demand, 1 unit of gas plant fires up to fill it then all 100 units are compensated at the gas rate even if the wind was cheap.
myrmidon 1y ago
You do realize that this is coupled with a 450MW gas power plant? Gas is a really appealing backup option for both renewable and nuclear powered grids (at least in the absence of freely available hydropower). But as installed power/capacity grows and batteries get cheaper, reliance on gas will hopefully decrease (and supply might get bolstered by renewable-powered synthgas within the next decades).
- cjrp 1y ago
  It's more about the negative effect that using gas has on the wholesale price of energy; electricity prices are determined by the most expensive source at that point in time. So we either need to get gas usage to 0, or change how that wholesale price is calculated in order to see a consumer benefit.
- stuaxo 1y ago
  Its attached to the national grid, so surely it can also charge of the grid as needed too.

It effectively decouples for any period when no gas is needed; so if those batteries let you turn off the gas generators for an hour the price decouples from gas.

u02sgb 1y ago
Think OP is taking about UK bills which are coupled too the cost of gas for historical reasons. Which needs to change in my view too.
- trebligdivad 1y ago
  Right - but if we start getting a useful amount of time when the grid doesn't need any gas, the amount of coupling should start to drop off.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
    Solving the engineering challenges of "useful amount of time when the grid doesn't need any gas" without also digging into why the UK's energy pricing structure is such an outlier at the expense of consumers, seem a bit like one of those doomed attempts to solve a social issue by purely technical means.
    - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
      Pretty much all of europe runs on marginal cost electricity. The UK was just extra stupid by banning nearly all construction of onshore wind.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
        While that is a slightly different cause, "banning nearly all construction of onshore wind" was and is a social issue. It's culture and politics, not engineering.
- tialaramex 1y ago
  They aren't per se coupled to gas. Here's roughly how it works: We work in half hours, 48 of them per day. If you're a very large user (e.g maybe you're a factory which makes cars), or if you choose to do this at home, you can be metered in half hours and billed this way. In advance of the half hour, we guess how much power we might need. 9pm here soon, I reckon 30GW per the British mainland. Now we run an auction. Everybody who can make power from 9pm to 9:30 bids, saying how much they'd accept to make power Then, starting from the lowest bids, we add bidders up to 30GW of power, those people will make our 30GW of electricity, and we pay all of them the same price, that price is last bid needed to meet our 30GW goal. This is often a closed cycle gas turbine because: 1. There are fucking shitloads of them. Probably 35GW nameplate, maybe 40GW, that is a lot of power generation. More than any other single type (Wind can deliver about 20GW to the grid, solar is smaller, nuclear is much smaller, storage also smaller even if you count it as generation which it technically is not) 2. They are (almost, maintenance is necessary) always willing to run, for a price. Rain or shine, night or day, if there is gas at any price they can charge that price plus a little profit to make it into electricity. Only question is if you'll pay For a typical home tariff the "supplier" you're paying has guessed that on average they'll make a healthy profit if they charge you say 24p per kWh plus standing. They pay that half-hourly price, if they guessed badly wrong and can't cover the difference they go bankrupt, which sucks for the government who are on the hook to ensure you still get electricity anyway. So, the de-coupling would happen automatically if the current system stayed the same but you added a lot of cheap storage and enough wind power that on average the country was mostly wind powered. Or indeed nukes or solar if somehow this country built loads of nuke stations or got improbably sunnier.

jacquesm 1y ago

That will never happen. They'll use that excuse until the very last gas powered plant is alive and then there will immediately be some other reason why energy prices have to stay the way they are.

octo888 1y ago
Precisely this!

ZeroGravitas 1y ago

The only sensible way to do this I've heard is to roll out more renewables faster and so burn less gas. Is there some other plans you support?

skippyboxedhero 1y ago
Rolling out more renewables faster will mean more reliance on gas. I am not sure how people still don't realise this after ten years of doing this and energy prices going up non-stop.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  At this point, there's not that much other non-renewable generation on the UK grid, so expanding renewables will reduce the impact of gas on prices (though it'll likely be non-linear).
  - spacebanana7 1y ago
    Gas complements renewables really well because gas can readily be tapped “on-demand” whilst renewables can only be tapped “on supply”. It’s relatively easy to turn off gas when renewables are supplying energy to the grid at near zero cost marginal cost. But also easy to turn on gas when the renewables aren’t supplying energy, or when demand spikes in a manner uncorrelated to renewable generation. Batteries are a more elegant solution long term, of course.
    - pydry 1y ago
      Gas complements everything well. It's relatively cheap, easy to store power in large amounts and completely dispatchable. Nothing else can do all 3. Batteries work well for short term day-to-day storage but they're impossibly expensive for seasonal storage which we will need a solution for for the last ~5-10% of decarbonization. Probably the only way to fully decarbonize will eventually be to synthesize gas.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago

boredpudding 1y ago

Does the UK not have an option for hourly-pricing? That's usually where as a consumer you can have the most gains. In the summer, with solar panels, my energy bill is negative (in The Netherlands)

Kognito 1y ago
We do, but I can’t imagine it’s hugely popular. Only a few of the smaller suppliers offer it AFAIK.
- OJFord 1y ago
  Octopus is the largest UK energy supplier, and offers half-hourly billing ('Agile').
0rdinal 1y ago
Some suppliers (e.g., Octopus Energy) offer half-hourly tariffs whose rates track the day-ahead wholesale market and are published daily. Prices usually fall when supply is abundant (e.g., windy/sunny periods) Day ahead pricing: https://agileprices.co.uk/ https://agileprices.co.uk/ National grid supply/demand and energy mix: https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/
rcxdude 1y ago
Yes, but the hourly price is still largely set by gas, because it's still a minority of the time where renewables are supplying 100% of the grid.
Havoc 1y ago
The UK has a stupid system where the pricing for everything is determined by the most expensive thing in the mix: >The UK’s electricity market operates using a system known as “marginal pricing”. This means that all of the power plants running in each half-hour period are paid the same price, set by the final generator that has to switch on to meet demand, which is known as the “marginal” unit. i.e. if you have 99 units of solar but have 100 demand, 1 unit of gas plant fires up to fill it then all 100 units are compensated at the gas rate even if the wind was cheap.

myrmidon 1y ago

You do realize that this is coupled with a 450MW gas power plant? Gas is a really appealing backup option for both renewable and nuclear powered grids (at least in the absence of freely available hydropower). But as installed power/capacity grows and batteries get cheaper, reliance on gas will hopefully decrease (and supply might get bolstered by renewable-powered synthgas within the next decades).

cjrp 1y ago
It's more about the negative effect that using gas has on the wholesale price of energy; electricity prices are determined by the most expensive source at that point in time. So we either need to get gas usage to 0, or change how that wholesale price is calculated in order to see a consumer benefit.
stuaxo 1y ago
Its attached to the national grid, so surely it can also charge of the grid as needed too.