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> 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

• 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
      > Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy. I will give credit to the person who got there before me. :) Smoothing out price volatility is a big one. But also it gives you options: You can buy it "today" when its cheap and store it for when you need it (e.g. winter months). You can also trade on that basis too. For example you can make a future-dated commitment to buy gas (knowing you have the storage available to take delivery). But if the situation changes and you later find you don't need it, you can sell that contract to someone else (or you can still take delivery and re-sell it). But you can't do any of that without having the ability to take delivery, because the person who sold you that future-dated contract will want both your money and to get the gas they sold you off their hands.
  • teamonkey 7mo ago
    Because if you have enough renewables and storage to eliminate gas from the mix you are no longer paying gas prices. The more often that happens, the cheaper your bills get.
• mytailorisrich 7mo ago
  The UK (and Europe) could produce much more gas and consequently control prices if they wanted. It is easy to always blame the previous government(s) but the current situation is policy across Western Europe. Edit: puzzled by the blunt downvotes for stating a noncontroversial fact. Over the last 15 years the US has invested in shale gas while the UK and EU have banned it. Even today the UK refuses expension of North Sea gas extraction. Whatever the reasons (environment, decarbonisation) it does mean that the situation we have now with gas across Western Europe is policy, not an unfortunate consequence of world events...
  • pydry 7mo ago
    It takes time though and it's hard to anticipate geopolitical shocks like the war in Ukraine and Iran.
    • mytailorisrich 7mo ago
      No, this has nothing to do with either. It is policy in the UK and EU not to produce gas on environmental and decarbonisation grounds, and so in fact high priced are policy.
    • traceroute66 7mo ago
      > Iran To be fair, I think you would be hard pushed to find anyone outside Israel who seriously thought Iran would ever be on the cards. Netanyahu dedicated 40 years of his life going to various US presidents trying to get their buy-in. The US presidents all clearly listened to what their advisors had to say regarding Hormuz etc. and said "Thanks, but no thanks" to Netanyahu. Then Trump came along who was ready to over-rule his advisors and surrounded himself with yes-men in his cabinet. I'm not being political here. A lot of it is public, for example just go to YouTube and look up the decades of videos of Netanyahu visiting the UN or US repeating the same line about "Iran being weeks away from a bomb", almost word-for-word for the last 40 years.
      • gambiting 7mo ago
        I don't think Trump particularily cares himself. But he's surrounded by weird religious cult who all think that attacking Iran and bringing in war in the middle east will bring on the end times and second coming of jesus christ. I honestly wish this was just a facade for attaining political power, but these nutjobs seem completely earnest in their beliefs.
• jordand 7mo ago
  Exactly, and the Tories banned onshore wind, and refused to really invest in offshore wind. We've got the North Sea and its perfect for wind farms we should have had for decades
  • mytailorisrich 7mo ago
    The current government is banning wind turbines factories and billions of Pounds in investments because "China". It is too easy to blame the previous government(s) when the current one has no strategic thinking or plan, either.
    • HPsquared 7mo ago
      High prices and maximum rent extraction is the plan. Same plan as the Tories and everyone else who gets close to power.
    • huijzer 7mo ago
      What's the point that incompetence flips over to malice?
    • jordand 7mo ago
      The previous government was in power for 14 straight years. The current (useless) government only came into power in July 2024. Yes, I think the previous government should have some of the blame. Just to add, wind turbine factory investments have failed for a few other reasons too. One local to me fell through because it was no longer economically viable (local competition, low margin, and of course cheap imports)
      • mytailorisrich 7mo ago
        Chinese company Ming Yang was planning to invest 1+ billion to build a factory in Scotland. They were going to be the local competition. UK government has just officially refused to approve it. This is a government decision based on politics and lobbying from other interests (US gov and EU competitors) and yet another U-turn for the government (as apparently gov was initially keen...).
• skippyboxedhero 7mo ago
  The study you have linked is completely wrong. There is no international market for gas because export/import is physically complex. This is why gas is priced very differently despite it being chemically similar (unlike oil). Anyone who says anything different should be immediately disregarded as someone who should not have an opinion. This is technically true for oil but there are two other factors. One, importing oil is environmentally-intensive and relies upon the assumption of free and open trade in oil...hopefully, the last few weeks have demonstrated why this is untrue. Two, the assumption is that mix of imports is not changing, because of high energy costs and reduction in North Sea production, UK refineries are shutting down so we are completely losing domestic capacity across the whole space. We aren't importing oil, we are importing refined products, losing domestic chemicals capacity, losing margin. Lower jobs, lower tax revenues, more reliance on imports. The above take would be somewhat funny if we weren't ten years into seeing the consequences of this. At this point, we could be back to the stone age and you would have the same people screeching that inventing fire is dangerous (I worked in equity research in the mid-2010s...I remember when Cameron was really pushing hard for this, Clegg was saying how expensive nuclear is, etc. people in the industry were saying this would very badly...the issue is that the political cycle is far shorter than the economic cycle, all of this stuff is obvious but people in the UK run on the political cycle so if it isn't the newspapers, no-one normal reads them, next week then it will never happen...same issue with housing, exactly the same thing happened, we are now subsidising retail electricity which is impossible to get out of, I remember specifically this idea was thought of as an insane impossibility but producers were saying it would have to happen, and giving huge subsidies to producers...this is all obvious, obvious things happening are obvious, producers were fine, they get paid the subsidies but consumers are getting shafted AND consistently voting to get shafted). Also, Roughs storage facility is in the sea...so I am not sure what "real estate" development was done here (the UK has been building 10-20% of the required growth in housing stock for something like two decades...again, the same people will be screeching about developers if we lived in caves). The reason it was closed was due to economics. For some reason, you deny that producing more gas would be useful but are outraged at a storage facility closing when the primary function of a storage facility is to allow energy producers to arb derivatives markets effectively. I have no idea how this makes sense to you based on all of the above...perhaps you just want to complain about the Tories? I have no idea. The current tax rate on North Sea production is 75%, there was ample opportunity for public benefit but multiple governments took that money and spent it on benefits. The reason why Norway has worked is because they incentivized exploration (again, something that you imply later would have no benefit...but okay). The policy of the last fifteen years has been to tax the industry heavily and disincentivize exploration. Revisiting this approach is extremely unpopular amongst all politicians which is why production has dropped. Even with this limitation, we have large gas fields that have been blocked (by the Tories btw) for environmental reasons. This isn't complicated: if you want more oil and gas, produce it and create more incentives to produce it. The reality is that people want to have their cake and eat it: North Sea production is both very pointless but paying huge amounts of carbon to import from the Middle East is a good idea and we have to pay subsidies of 30-40% electricity bills to subsidies green production...which is also very profitable but requires subsidies because of Tory developers or something. The UK isn't a serious country. What is happening to the UK is a reflection of phenomenally poor political leadership. It is deserved.
• enlyth 7mo ago
  Is gas expensive though? It's like 6p per kWh at the moment with electricity about 25p per kWh for consumers. I think gas is dirt cheap, heating your home and hot water with electricity is 4x more expensive and costs hundreds a month.
  • simonsquiff 7mo ago
    It’s only x4 more expensive to use electricity with old methods like immersion / resistance heaters Heat pumps are 400% efficient or more, so have parity or better with gas prices
    • leonidasrup 7mo ago
      Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications. https://www.irena.org/Innovation-landscape-for-smart-electrification/Power-to-heat-and-cooling/3-High-temperature-heat-pumps https://www.irena.org/Innovation-landscape-for-smart-electri... With electric resistance heating you can gen very high temperatures, but with less than 100% efficiency. With electric arc heating you can melt steel, but again less than 100% efficient.
      • pfdietz 7mo ago
        > Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications. They do if you start from ambient temperature, but they can be more effective if they are pumping heat out of the waste heat stream of a process. This requires different working fluids than lower temperature systems, though. Most industrial heat energy is not consumed at very high temperature. IIRC, 2/3rds is at less than 300 C. Electric resistance heating might also allow PV to dispense with auxiliary equipment, like inverters, so even if inefficient that might not matter as much. Heat also allows easy long duration storage at scale, even at rather high temperature, so resistive heating can be used with intermittently available cheap surplus power.
        • leonidasrup 7mo ago
• mike_hearn 7mo ago
  > Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation Post privatization domestic gas production rose 900%. Increasing supply = cheaper prices. Prices were low and stable at the time compared to today: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9491/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-... This claim is the sort of dangerous ideological nonsense that is so common in Britain, and which has wrecked it. Literally every time socialist policies fail people come out of the woodwork to blame privatization, and yet invariably this made things better despite an often botched process. The American oil/gas industry is fully private and yet they have much cheaper energy: blaming Thatcher is dumb and not the answer. Gas in the UK is expensive because successive British governments wanted to have nothing to do with it and did everything they could to crush the suppliers. They thought deliberately deindustrializing the country was moral and ethical, for "climate" reasons. So they: • Imposed massive "windfall" taxes on the industry to the extent that nobody developed new sources • Then imposed very high carbon prices on it • Banned fracking • Stopped issuing licenses for exploration • Imposed price caps • Chased all the industry that needed cheap energy away to Asia • Shut down gas storage facilities, exposing Britain to the global spot price • Didn't build other reliable energy sources like nuclear or coal End result: high prices and shortages. There are graphs here that show how much of the British electricity price is artificially created by government: https://davidturver.substack.com/p/why-is-my-energy-bill-so-high https://davidturver.substack.com/p/why-is-my-energy-bill-so-... Other countries didn't make all these mistakes together. And they were mistakes by the government. Really, can you even claim the British energy industry is private when the government takes 80%+ of its profits? Socialist policies always create shortages and high prices. Always.