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Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

415 points by rwmj 7mo ago

mytailorisrich 7mo ago
11am, nicely sunny-ish and quite windy here... and so 65% wind, 25% solar.
nickslaughter02 7mo ago
> 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-electricity-prices-132651553.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/britain-paying-highest-e...
- ghighi7878 7mo ago
  Yes. But these things can be orthogonal. Or actually brcause gas is expensive. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro 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.
  - eliben 7mo ago
    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.
    - gentooflux 7mo ago
      Why is it "people are willing to pay" and not "corporations are brazen enough to charge"? These utilities are necessities and relatively few people have access to cheaper alternatives to them.
      - vovavili 7mo ago
        Because, under usual circumstances, self-interested corporations compete against each other to get as close to what people are willing to pay for energy as possible.
        cap11235 7mo ago
        > compete against each other Citation needed.
        vovavili 7mo ago
        https://lmgt.org/?q=econ+101 https://lmgt.org/?q=econ+101
        tzs 7mo ago
        There’s a reason most universities don’t hand you a bachelors degree in economics as soon as you complete EC101. You should look into EC102 and the rest of the curriculum.
      - beejiu 7mo ago
        The regulations mandate that the market operates that way. It's the government that should be held to account.
  - hvb2 7mo ago
    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
    - scratcheee 7mo ago
      Yes, and I think that’s actually intentional, they’re rewarding renewables way over the odds without needing to give politically controversial benefits. The rewards are just an inherent result of the existing system. This is why renewables are growing rapidly in the uk. Of course we’ll need a way to resolve fluctuations both rapid and slower. Rapid fluctuations are handled by pumped hydro and increasingly by batteries. The slow fluctuations (day/night all the way to summer/winter and good/bad weather patterns) are much trickier, I think it’s still unclear how well handle them, but it will certainly be partly handled by having an excess of renewables, though we’ll likely need some other solutions too, nuclear is probably one of them.
      - pydry 7mo ago
        The irony is that your comment should be entirely inverted. Renewables are not rewarded way over the odds - in fact the ruling party banned onshore wind entirely and i remember them banning at least one offshore wind farm. Luckily it is very cheap to build. Now Hinkley Point C is another story. It's a hugely expensive boondoggle which is taking decades to construct at enormous cost and the reward at the end is that they are rewarded with a strike price that is 3x that of solar and wind. That is an obsecene subsidy forced on to customers for a power source that cant even do load following and doesnt help with fluctuations in supply and demand. The slow fluctuations on cold, windless nights or when nuke plants are down for unplanned maintenance are going to be managed with gas. Maybe one day it'll be gas synthesized with electricity from solar+wind overproduction on a day like today. The roundtrip is expensive, but will still be cheaper than nuclear power on a windy, summer day.
    - 7mo ago
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  - elcritch 7mo ago
    Renewables may be the cheapest at spot values, but there needs to be a way to price in the intermittent nature of the power.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - pydry 7mo ago
      There is. The cost of my electricity changes every half hour.
    - ViewTrick1002 7mo ago
      People disliking renewables always say this. Then when asked what method to price in the Swedish nuclear fleet having ~50% of capacity offline multiple times last year and France famously having 50% of the capacity offline during the energy crisis I always get crickets for answers. It’s apparently fine when nuclear plants doesn’t deliver, but not renewables. The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.
  - traceroute66 7mo ago
    > 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-approach-north-sea-would-cost-households-more-fully-renewable-uk-finds-oxford https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/drill-baby-drill-appro...
    - RobinL 7mo ago
      Why would additional storage make a significant difference to the price of gas?
      - nicoburns 7mo ago
        Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy.
        traceroute66 7mo ago
  - jordand 7mo ago
    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.
  - krona 7mo ago
    > 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.
  - qxmat 7mo ago
    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-order-mean 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/ https://a115.co.uk/global-gas-market/ (you can download the PDF guide at the bottom without giving any information)
  - collinmcnulty 7mo ago
    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.
  - roenxi 7mo ago
    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/ 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.
    - trollbridge 7mo ago
      Seems like a very good case to get storage and power backup in people's homes. Industrial users could install their own gas fired generators. Residential consumers could have simple battery based backup, or even a generator which would double for helping during powerouts.
      - roenxi 7mo ago
        Bigger question is why they haven't already - these trends have been in place for a very long time and this current phase of the UK energy crisis has been on display for years. Anything legal and cost effective would have been done by now if the market had anything to say about it. Which suggests something odd is afoot. Maybe storage is more expensive than gas, maybe the UK government has regulated the option out of existence. Maybe something else.
        energy123 7mo ago
        Probably because it doesn't make economic sense to install storage prior to renewables being so substantial that you start having to curtail.
    - 7mo ago
  - shafyy 7mo ago
    Well explained, thank you! This is called the marginal price. Many people are not aware of this and are then think renewables are expensive.
- rurounijones 7mo ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEnFmrgEbWo
  - krona 7mo ago
    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.
    - rurounijones 7mo ago
      The issue is that if my electricity I am using now is 99% renewable and 1% gas then I am paying as if 100% is gas. That is why prices are so high. The video goes into much better detail but the keyword if you want to search yourself is "marginal cost pricing. You can still have dispatchable gas without this pricing structure.
      - eigenspace 7mo ago
        You can have dispatchable gas without that pricing structure, but having a grid without that pricing structure can't really function without major nationalization of power generation. Marginal pricing is one of those things that at first sounds crazy, but when you delve into the topic, it's the only sensible way to have market pricing on electricity generation. The only real alternative would be a fully nationalized grid where the government buys up all the dispatachable power sources.
        stavros 7mo ago
        Do you have anything I can read on why marginal pricing is the only sensible way to have pricing? EDIT: Ah, apparently it aligns market forces well, by making cheap energy sources massively profitable to run, so more and more get added. Perversely, though, it seems to me that it also incentivizes an entire renewable grid to not expand to 100%, so they all enjoy a much higher price.
- BoredPositron 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- energy123 7mo ago
  Are you arguing causality? Texas generates significant renewables, and has low electricity prices.
- internet2000 7mo ago
  I'm sure there's an (un)healthy dose of degrowth to let them hit that 90% number too.
  - swarnie 7mo ago
    Economic rocket fuel lands in Dover most mornings, it'll balance out. - Ed Miliband 2026 (probably)
- sega_sai 7mo ago
  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.
  - ph4rsikal 7mo ago
    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.
  - 0xy 7mo ago
    Renewables inherently require gas peakers.
- dietr1ch 7mo ago
  Footing the technology development bills as a developed country should. Britain owes the world a lot in terms of fossil fuel contamination too.
- benrutter 7mo ago
  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.
  - ZeroGravitas 7mo ago
    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-interconnection-data-tool/ https://ember-energy.org/data/europe-electricity-interconnec...
- 4ndrewl 7mo ago
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- ZeroGravitas 7mo ago
  > 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.
PunchyHamster 7mo ago
and still somehow pay tons for "cheap" green electricity
- thebruce87m 7mo ago
  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.
  - AlexandrB 7mo ago
    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.
    - jackpeterfletch 7mo ago
      My understanding is that legislation is in the works to fix that. But we’ll see.
      - teamonkey 7mo ago
        Yesterday it was announced that a trial would take place so that regions near wind farms can receive free energy from them in periods of curtailment. https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNewsUK/s/jG5OCSWTTy https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNewsUK/s/jG5OCSWTTy
        swarnie 7mo ago
        Unless i'm reading this wrong I'm pretty sure i already have this in the UK nad have done for years. What's the trial even for...
imranstrive7 7mo ago
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idiotsecant 7mo ago
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)
- zug_zug 7mo ago
  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"
  - codexb 7mo ago
    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.
    - ZeroGravitas 7mo ago
      It was a widely considered impossible to have more than single digit percentage of renewables even for instantaneous figures. That "limit" has been raised again and again as the world gets more experience with it. It's great that we've made so much progress that people can say "it's just 90% renewable for 30 mins" but that's a result of decades of hard work.
      - idiotsecant 7mo ago
        You are conflating ideas here and it's getting muddled up. Literally nobody ever said that we couldn't handle 100% renewables for brief periods. The single digit percentage you're referring to is not about the renewables, it's about when the renewables aren't there. Its about maintaining grid stability when you don't have dispatchable sources to do it with. Essentially what we've built is a system where the renewables provide a tertiary function- providing power when they want to, but not in a reliable way, so we still have the same carbon based dispatchable resources. This is not a serious system. We've done a bit of work on th cheap, easy part. Installing some solar panels is easy and costs almost nothing. The storage and transmission of power is 90% of the actual work!
comrade1234 7mo ago
Why don't they count pumped storage and batteries as renewable?
- ilovecake1984 7mo ago
  They are storage. They should count as neither.
- teamonkey 7mo ago
  Because they’re not generation, they’re storage. You need to charge them and that charge can come from any source.
indubioprorubik 7mo ago
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.
- stingraycharles 7mo ago
  > deindustrialization leads to debt slavery Ok I’ll bite — how? Surely not because manufacturing is the only way to create value?
  - indubioprorubik 7mo ago
    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.
- nslsm 7mo ago
  They downvote you because this website calls itself progressive but it loves offshoring and basically anything that hurts the working class.
jackpeterfletch 7mo ago
9.4% is Gas + Biomass (not clean) But there’s a generation surplus and export of +13.4%!
goldenarm 7mo ago
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 https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/12mo/monthly
- tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
  France has much more nuclear. You can argue that is better but even if you agree it would take decades to get there.
  - dotancohen 7mo ago
    South Korea builds nuclear power plants in five years.
    - jahnu 7mo ago
      Not any more they don't. Those were older reactor designs which nobody wants now. And the 5 years was first-pour to switch on. Add a few years for planning, permitting and actually supplying to the grid. Newly approved Korean plans are aiming for 2038. Best of luck to them. I'm sceptical they'll make it. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/plans-for-two-new-reactors-confirmed-by-south-korea https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/plans-for-two-ne... Edit to add: They used to be pretty fast but like everyone else seem to be slowing down significantly. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-o-s/south-korea https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
      - dotancohen 7mo ago
        Thank you for the correction.
        jahnu 7mo ago
        No worries, mate. It’s a super interesting topic!
deleted 7mo ago
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byteface 7mo ago
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.
Havoc 7mo ago
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
oybng 7mo ago
The landscape has been destroyed by wind turbines, and energy prices are higher than ever. lose lose.
- celsoazevedo 7mo ago
  > 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).
- gehsty 7mo ago
  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.
Jemm 7mo ago
If by renewables you mean lumber from Canada, then sure.
- lancebeet 7mo ago
  Sorry, what are you implying here? That people burn lumber from Canada to heat their homes?
  - mb5 7mo ago
    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-power-plant-to-stop-burning-controversial-canadian-wood-within-next-year https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/26/drax-pow...
- llyama 7mo ago
  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.
djhworld 7mo ago
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.
- terabytest 7mo ago
  Why did you choose this plan in place of a fixed price plan?
  - djhworld 7mo ago
    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
dana321 7mo ago
Yes, because its windy today
oulipo2 7mo ago
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")
sudoku1211 7mo ago
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fguerraz 7mo ago
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.
- margalabargala 7mo ago
  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.
  - adamckay 7mo ago
    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.
    - margalabargala 7mo ago
      The burning is still part of the short term carbon cycle, and biomass is still renewable. Boreal forests in particular lose carbon sequestration capacity as they age, and from a carbon perspective cutting them down for lumber is a good thing. Wood pellets are generally from the waste material, not wood that could be used as lumber for houses or whatever. You can certainly make other arguments in favor of not cutting down old growth forests, and certainly transport using fossil fuels is bad, but "I don't like how they go about it and also they release emissions that I don't care to understand how it fits into the carbon cycle" doesn't mean they "aren't renewable". The point you could effectively make if you so chose would be "renewable energy sources are not cut and dry always a good thing".
- 7mo ago
sph 7mo ago
Related - world-wide map of energy generation: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?signal=renewable-energy https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig... Discussion (didn't seem to get much traction): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553165
xp84 7mo ago
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.
- themoose8 7mo ago
  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.
  - zajio1am 7mo ago
    The same system is used all over EU.
- jeffbee 7mo ago
  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.
  - celeritascelery 7mo ago
    Volumetric rate is all that matters to normal consumers. It doesn’t matter where the costs come from or why. Only $/kwh.
deleted 7mo ago
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DrBazza 7mo ago
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.
GartzenDeHaes 7mo ago
Good thing they won't be needing any of that LNG from the Gulf.
SoftTalker 7mo ago
What about tonight?
gehsty 7mo ago
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!
zeristor 7mo ago
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.
- zeristor 7mo ago
  I mean negative prices should diminish if there are batteries to charge on it.
- zeristor 7mo ago
  This presentation suggests that BESS is used to keep the frequency stable, and remove huge price spikes: https://cigre.org.uk/web-cont1001/uploads/Integrating-Grid-Forming-and-Grid-Following-Battery-Energy-Storage-Systems-into-Power-Markets.pdf https://cigre.org.uk/web-cont1001/uploads/Integrating-Grid-F... This suggests that there is evidence for these sort of issues somewhere else on the web.
tsoukase 7mo ago
Adapting to a fossil fuel free society damands to comply to some inconveniences, like to afford some days without or expensive electricity, to change the time of device use, even to be used to lower home temperatures. For me the most difficult part is to persuade my wife to comply. Fortunately I have solar/battery/netmetering and I only pay a small amount for the network use.

415 points by rwmj 7mo ago

11am, nicely sunny-ish and quite windy here... and so 65% wind, 25% solar.

> 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-electricity-prices-132651553.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/britain-paying-highest-e...

ghighi7878 7mo ago
Yes. But these things can be orthogonal. Or actually brcause gas is expensive. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro 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.
- eliben 7mo ago
  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.
  - gentooflux 7mo ago
    Why is it "people are willing to pay" and not "corporations are brazen enough to charge"? These utilities are necessities and relatively few people have access to cheaper alternatives to them.
    - vovavili 7mo ago
      Because, under usual circumstances, self-interested corporations compete against each other to get as close to what people are willing to pay for energy as possible.
      - cap11235 7mo ago
        > compete against each other Citation needed.
        vovavili 7mo ago
        https://lmgt.org/?q=econ+101 https://lmgt.org/?q=econ+101
        tzs 7mo ago
        There’s a reason most universities don’t hand you a bachelors degree in economics as soon as you complete EC101. You should look into EC102 and the rest of the curriculum.
    - beejiu 7mo ago
      The regulations mandate that the market operates that way. It's the government that should be held to account.
- hvb2 7mo ago
  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
  - scratcheee 7mo ago
    Yes, and I think that’s actually intentional, they’re rewarding renewables way over the odds without needing to give politically controversial benefits. The rewards are just an inherent result of the existing system. This is why renewables are growing rapidly in the uk. Of course we’ll need a way to resolve fluctuations both rapid and slower. Rapid fluctuations are handled by pumped hydro and increasingly by batteries. The slow fluctuations (day/night all the way to summer/winter and good/bad weather patterns) are much trickier, I think it’s still unclear how well handle them, but it will certainly be partly handled by having an excess of renewables, though we’ll likely need some other solutions too, nuclear is probably one of them.
    - pydry 7mo ago
      The irony is that your comment should be entirely inverted. Renewables are not rewarded way over the odds - in fact the ruling party banned onshore wind entirely and i remember them banning at least one offshore wind farm. Luckily it is very cheap to build. Now Hinkley Point C is another story. It's a hugely expensive boondoggle which is taking decades to construct at enormous cost and the reward at the end is that they are rewarded with a strike price that is 3x that of solar and wind. That is an obsecene subsidy forced on to customers for a power source that cant even do load following and doesnt help with fluctuations in supply and demand. The slow fluctuations on cold, windless nights or when nuke plants are down for unplanned maintenance are going to be managed with gas. Maybe one day it'll be gas synthesized with electricity from solar+wind overproduction on a day like today. The roundtrip is expensive, but will still be cheaper than nuclear power on a windy, summer day.
  - 7mo ago
- deleted 7mo ago
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- elcritch 7mo ago
  Renewables may be the cheapest at spot values, but there needs to be a way to price in the intermittent nature of the power.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - pydry 7mo ago
    There is. The cost of my electricity changes every half hour.
  - ViewTrick1002 7mo ago
    People disliking renewables always say this. Then when asked what method to price in the Swedish nuclear fleet having ~50% of capacity offline multiple times last year and France famously having 50% of the capacity offline during the energy crisis I always get crickets for answers. It’s apparently fine when nuclear plants doesn’t deliver, but not renewables. The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.
- traceroute66 7mo ago
  > 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-approach-north-sea-would-cost-households-more-fully-renewable-uk-finds-oxford https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/drill-baby-drill-appro...
  - RobinL 7mo ago
    Why would additional storage make a significant difference to the price of gas?
    - nicoburns 7mo ago
      Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy.
      - traceroute66 7mo ago
- jordand 7mo ago
  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.
- krona 7mo ago
  > 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.
- qxmat 7mo ago
  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-order-mean 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/ https://a115.co.uk/global-gas-market/ (you can download the PDF guide at the bottom without giving any information)
- collinmcnulty 7mo ago
  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.
- roenxi 7mo ago
  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/ 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.
  - trollbridge 7mo ago
    Seems like a very good case to get storage and power backup in people's homes. Industrial users could install their own gas fired generators. Residential consumers could have simple battery based backup, or even a generator which would double for helping during powerouts.
    - roenxi 7mo ago
      Bigger question is why they haven't already - these trends have been in place for a very long time and this current phase of the UK energy crisis has been on display for years. Anything legal and cost effective would have been done by now if the market had anything to say about it. Which suggests something odd is afoot. Maybe storage is more expensive than gas, maybe the UK government has regulated the option out of existence. Maybe something else.
      - energy123 7mo ago
        Probably because it doesn't make economic sense to install storage prior to renewables being so substantial that you start having to curtail.
  - 7mo ago
- shafyy 7mo ago
  Well explained, thank you! This is called the marginal price. Many people are not aware of this and are then think renewables are expensive.
rurounijones 7mo ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEnFmrgEbWo
- krona 7mo ago
  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.
  - rurounijones 7mo ago
    The issue is that if my electricity I am using now is 99% renewable and 1% gas then I am paying as if 100% is gas. That is why prices are so high. The video goes into much better detail but the keyword if you want to search yourself is "marginal cost pricing. You can still have dispatchable gas without this pricing structure.
    - eigenspace 7mo ago
      You can have dispatchable gas without that pricing structure, but having a grid without that pricing structure can't really function without major nationalization of power generation. Marginal pricing is one of those things that at first sounds crazy, but when you delve into the topic, it's the only sensible way to have market pricing on electricity generation. The only real alternative would be a fully nationalized grid where the government buys up all the dispatachable power sources.
      - stavros 7mo ago
        Do you have anything I can read on why marginal pricing is the only sensible way to have pricing? EDIT: Ah, apparently it aligns market forces well, by making cheap energy sources massively profitable to run, so more and more get added. Perversely, though, it seems to me that it also incentivizes an entire renewable grid to not expand to 100%, so they all enjoy a much higher price.
BoredPositron 7mo ago
[flagged]
energy123 7mo ago
Are you arguing causality? Texas generates significant renewables, and has low electricity prices.
internet2000 7mo ago
I'm sure there's an (un)healthy dose of degrowth to let them hit that 90% number too.
- swarnie 7mo ago
  Economic rocket fuel lands in Dover most mornings, it'll balance out. - Ed Miliband 2026 (probably)
sega_sai 7mo ago
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.
- ph4rsikal 7mo ago
  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.
- 0xy 7mo ago
  Renewables inherently require gas peakers.
dietr1ch 7mo ago
Footing the technology development bills as a developed country should. Britain owes the world a lot in terms of fossil fuel contamination too.
benrutter 7mo ago
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.
- ZeroGravitas 7mo ago
  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-interconnection-data-tool/ https://ember-energy.org/data/europe-electricity-interconnec...
4ndrewl 7mo ago
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ZeroGravitas 7mo ago
> 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.

PunchyHamster 7mo ago

and still somehow pay tons for "cheap" green electricity

thebruce87m 7mo ago
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.
- AlexandrB 7mo ago
  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.
  - jackpeterfletch 7mo ago
    My understanding is that legislation is in the works to fix that. But we’ll see.
    - teamonkey 7mo ago
      Yesterday it was announced that a trial would take place so that regions near wind farms can receive free energy from them in periods of curtailment. https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNewsUK/s/jG5OCSWTTy https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNewsUK/s/jG5OCSWTTy
      - swarnie 7mo ago
        Unless i'm reading this wrong I'm pretty sure i already have this in the UK nad have done for years. What's the trial even for...

imranstrive7 7mo ago

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idiotsecant 7mo ago

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)

zug_zug 7mo ago
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"
- codexb 7mo ago
  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.
  - ZeroGravitas 7mo ago
    It was a widely considered impossible to have more than single digit percentage of renewables even for instantaneous figures. That "limit" has been raised again and again as the world gets more experience with it. It's great that we've made so much progress that people can say "it's just 90% renewable for 30 mins" but that's a result of decades of hard work.
    - idiotsecant 7mo ago
      You are conflating ideas here and it's getting muddled up. Literally nobody ever said that we couldn't handle 100% renewables for brief periods. The single digit percentage you're referring to is not about the renewables, it's about when the renewables aren't there. Its about maintaining grid stability when you don't have dispatchable sources to do it with. Essentially what we've built is a system where the renewables provide a tertiary function- providing power when they want to, but not in a reliable way, so we still have the same carbon based dispatchable resources. This is not a serious system. We've done a bit of work on th cheap, easy part. Installing some solar panels is easy and costs almost nothing. The storage and transmission of power is 90% of the actual work!

comrade1234 7mo ago

Why don't they count pumped storage and batteries as renewable?

ilovecake1984 7mo ago
They are storage. They should count as neither.
teamonkey 7mo ago
Because they’re not generation, they’re storage. You need to charge them and that charge can come from any source.

indubioprorubik 7mo ago

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.

stingraycharles 7mo ago
> deindustrialization leads to debt slavery Ok I’ll bite — how? Surely not because manufacturing is the only way to create value?
- indubioprorubik 7mo ago
  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.
nslsm 7mo ago
They downvote you because this website calls itself progressive but it loves offshoring and basically anything that hurts the working class.

jackpeterfletch 7mo ago

9.4% is Gas + Biomass (not clean) But there’s a generation surplus and export of +13.4%!

goldenarm 7mo ago

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 https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/12mo/monthly

tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
France has much more nuclear. You can argue that is better but even if you agree it would take decades to get there.
- dotancohen 7mo ago
  South Korea builds nuclear power plants in five years.
  - jahnu 7mo ago
    Not any more they don't. Those were older reactor designs which nobody wants now. And the 5 years was first-pour to switch on. Add a few years for planning, permitting and actually supplying to the grid. Newly approved Korean plans are aiming for 2038. Best of luck to them. I'm sceptical they'll make it. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/plans-for-two-new-reactors-confirmed-by-south-korea https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/plans-for-two-ne... Edit to add: They used to be pretty fast but like everyone else seem to be slowing down significantly. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-o-s/south-korea https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
    - dotancohen 7mo ago
      Thank you for the correction.
      - jahnu 7mo ago
        No worries, mate. It’s a super interesting topic!

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

byteface 7mo ago

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.

Havoc 7mo ago

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

oybng 7mo ago

The landscape has been destroyed by wind turbines, and energy prices are higher than ever. lose lose.

celsoazevedo 7mo ago
> 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).
gehsty 7mo ago
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.

Jemm 7mo ago

If by renewables you mean lumber from Canada, then sure.

lancebeet 7mo ago
Sorry, what are you implying here? That people burn lumber from Canada to heat their homes?
- mb5 7mo ago
  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-power-plant-to-stop-burning-controversial-canadian-wood-within-next-year https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/26/drax-pow...
llyama 7mo ago
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.

djhworld 7mo ago

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.

terabytest 7mo ago
Why did you choose this plan in place of a fixed price plan?
- djhworld 7mo ago
  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

dana321 7mo ago

Yes, because its windy today

oulipo2 7mo ago

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")

sudoku1211 7mo ago

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fguerraz 7mo ago

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.

margalabargala 7mo ago
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.
- adamckay 7mo ago
  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.
  - margalabargala 7mo ago
    The burning is still part of the short term carbon cycle, and biomass is still renewable. Boreal forests in particular lose carbon sequestration capacity as they age, and from a carbon perspective cutting them down for lumber is a good thing. Wood pellets are generally from the waste material, not wood that could be used as lumber for houses or whatever. You can certainly make other arguments in favor of not cutting down old growth forests, and certainly transport using fossil fuels is bad, but "I don't like how they go about it and also they release emissions that I don't care to understand how it fits into the carbon cycle" doesn't mean they "aren't renewable". The point you could effectively make if you so chose would be "renewable energy sources are not cut and dry always a good thing".
7mo ago

sph 7mo ago

Related - world-wide map of energy generation: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?signal=renewable-energy https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig... Discussion (didn't seem to get much traction): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553165

xp84 7mo ago

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.

themoose8 7mo ago
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.
- zajio1am 7mo ago
  The same system is used all over EU.
jeffbee 7mo ago
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.
- celeritascelery 7mo ago
  Volumetric rate is all that matters to normal consumers. It doesn’t matter where the costs come from or why. Only $/kwh.

deleted 7mo ago

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DrBazza 7mo ago

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.

GartzenDeHaes 7mo ago

Good thing they won't be needing any of that LNG from the Gulf.

SoftTalker 7mo ago

What about tonight?

gehsty 7mo ago

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!

zeristor 7mo ago

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.

zeristor 7mo ago
I mean negative prices should diminish if there are batteries to charge on it.
zeristor 7mo ago
This presentation suggests that BESS is used to keep the frequency stable, and remove huge price spikes: https://cigre.org.uk/web-cont1001/uploads/Integrating-Grid-Forming-and-Grid-Following-Battery-Energy-Storage-Systems-into-Power-Markets.pdf https://cigre.org.uk/web-cont1001/uploads/Integrating-Grid-F... This suggests that there is evidence for these sort of issues somewhere else on the web.

tsoukase 7mo ago

Adapting to a fossil fuel free society damands to comply to some inconveniences, like to afford some days without or expensive electricity, to change the time of device use, even to be used to lower home temperatures. For me the most difficult part is to persuade my wife to comply. Fortunately I have solar/battery/netmetering and I only pay a small amount for the network use.