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Record wind and solar saved UK from gas imports worth £1B in March 2026
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- adds68 6mo agoEurope seems to be responding well since the Ukraine war, the picture now is a lot more positive than in 2022. The UK has postionined itself well, even without the mass uptake of local generation/storage in it's domestic market.
- jl6 6mo agoElectricity prices in the UK are painful, and galling when set by the price of gas, but it’s worth remembering that this model and all this expense has bought a major asset that will only become more important and strategic. The next milestones to hit are: * A 10x increase in generation capacity * A 100x increase in storage capacity * A 1000x increase in seasonal storage capacity * Electrification of heating * Electrification of synfuels and synthetic chemical feedstocks Full energy sovereignty is achievable within 10 years at wartime-spending levels. Probably 30 years otherwise. Rehabilitation of nuclear is almost certainly required for the transition and a very good hedge / backstop regardless.
- pjc50 6mo agoYeah, we're (UK) only just at the "occasionally cheap 100% renewables" state, and it's maddeningly slow progress. But it seems like a lot of things are suddenly coming online, like battery storage, and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years. https://eandt.theiet.org/2026/04/02/ps12bn-plan-upgrade-scotlands-electricity-grid-kicks https://eandt.theiet.org/2026/04/02/ps12bn-plan-upgrade-scot...
- rcxdude 6mo agoThe transition will probably be quite nonlinear: getting from zero to a few days a year of 100% renewables is about as much effort as going from a few days a year to most of the year.
- 7952 6mo agoPlug in solar could be like that.
- ErroneousBosh 6mo ago> and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years. I hope not. We're currently getting shafted by National Grid pricing, and this is only going to mean we get to pay even more for electricity where it's generated while the south coast of the UK gets it cheap.
- benj111 6mo agoWe get that now. They were looking in to zonal pricing last year but backed out.
- EliRivers 6mo agoElectricity prices in the UK are painful, and galling when set by the price of gas It's painful indeed. Today, I watched the price go negative as wind and solar reduced the gas contribution to about 3% of the mix. As that gas mix rose to 5%, the price turned around and became painfully expensive again.
- crote 6mo ago> Rehabilitation of nuclear is almost certainly required for the transition Using nuclear means electricity prices will be set by the price of nuclear - which is even higher than the price of gas. Besides, it is economically impossible to operate it as backstop as almost all of its costs are in paying back the construction loan: run it 10% of the time and its cost-per-kWh is increased by 10x, run it 1% of the time and its cost-per-kWh is increased by 100x. With that kind of budget there are suddenly a lot of alternatives to nuclear as generation-of-last-resort.
- adrianN 6mo agoHow do you make money with a nuclear power plant when renewables deliver more than enough power 95% of the year?
- jmyeet 6mo agoI couldn't disagree more. I'm going to point to Gary Stevenson [1] for why. He could probably get to the point faster but here's the core premise: Europe responded to the energy shocks since 2020 by transferring the better part of a trillion euros to energy companies in the US and the Middle East, particularly for LNG. Imagine where Europe might be if half a trillion euros was spent on renewables. The core problem as he describes it is that European governments don't own these providers so it's a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the ultra-wealthy. Back in the pandemic, Spain was one of the few countries that tackled the inflation shock in a better way with a windfall profits tax. Interestingly, Europe is talking about doing that now [2]. That would be smarter. Energy prices disproportionately hurt the poor [3]. If the government owned or part-owned the energy (like Norway does) then you could offset that without burning cash to stick your head in the sand for a little bit longer. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi265I48MdI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi265I48MdI [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/04/europe-energy-windfall-profit-tax.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/04/europe-energy-windfall-profi... [3]: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2023/rising-household-energy-costs-affect-lower-income-and-non-white-residents-most https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2023/rising-household...
- argsnd 6mo agoUseful background on Mr. Stevenson https://www.ft.com/content/7e8b47b3-7931-4354-9e8a-47d75d057fff https://www.ft.com/content/7e8b47b3-7931-4354-9e8a-47d75d057...
- blitzar 6mo agoEveryone on TV gobbing off about anything is a grifter.
- martinald 6mo agoThe UK had/has the exact same windfall tax on energy: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-generator-levy-introduction/electricity-generator-levy https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-gener... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-profits-levy-reforms-2024/energy-profits-levy-reforms-2024 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-profits-le... And the reason Spain is so well insulated is because they have limited gas interconnection so they have a 'captive supplier' in Algerian gas. Algerian gas can basically only go to Spain, Morocco or the domestic Algerian market. They have some limited LNG export capacity (which is growing and will significantly change the price Spain pays longer term).
- adammarples 6mo agoThe UK has positioned itself almost uniquely poorly in Europe. That is why its government bond prices are trading at a premium to the others.
- FridayoLeary 6mo agoWe have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. The politicians obsess over net-zero at the expense of dealing with the issues affecting most people.
- cjrp 6mo agoWhat if a happy byproduct of pushing for net zero is more investment in renewables, and decoupling the electricity price from gas?
- noir_lord 6mo agoPart of the reason why we have high electricity costs (here in the UK) is that we peg the price to gas generation, on the face of it people complain about that but the higher price allows investments in renewables to make sense on an RoI PoV, effectively it's a subsidy to build out renewables at a higher rate than would otherwise be the case. Electricity prices are high in the UK but there is a net benefit to it at least some ways, as always the devil is in the details, all the details.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mono442 6mo agoIsn't that just an excuse to justify the scam? Texas has very low electricity prices and at the same time a growing share of renewables.
- rcxdude 6mo agoTexas famously had massive spikes in electricty prices and a near failure of the grid because of their electricity market structure, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
- ZeroGravitas 6mo agoTexas has some different choices in their electricity markets but they use the same pay-as-clear marginal pricing system that the above poster thinks is a secret UK plan to subsidise renewables. In reality it is the standard way to set the market price of commodities.
- Synaesthesia 6mo agoWhen I was young they talked about a green revolution. Now with low solar panel costs, as well as batteries and inverters we really are living in a green revolution.
- sefrost 6mo agoDoes this cancel out the high energy prices people in the UK have been paying for the past decade+? Part of the reason the bills are high is because they subsidise the installation of renewable generation.
- rwmj 6mo agoIn hindsight it was quite prescient to be installing renewables wasn't it.
- tonyedgecombe 6mo agoIt might have been better to lump some of those costs on gas rather than electricity. Polluter pays and all that.
- te_chris 6mo agoYes. Obviously it does.
- sefrost 6mo agoIs it obvious? Do you have the figures? One month of £1bn savings vs what cost over the last 20 years? I support the roll out of renewables. I worked for a renewable energy company in the UK. I just think a lot of consumers (industry and residential) have had to pay a very high price to get to the current situation. And lots of foreign private and other institutional (the Crown) organisations have benefitted most from this fast but expensive transition.
- vrganj 6mo agoSounds like that was a good idea, then? Not sure why you perceive this as some sort of gotcha or an axe to grind. Yes, building infrastructure costs money. Where's the problem?
- IshKebab 6mo ago> Part of the reason bills are high is because they subsidise the installation of renewable generation. Yeah citation definitely needed. UK electricity prices are high because we are highly dependent on imported gas.
- edent 6mo agoI'm in the UK and am currently being paid to use electricity. My energy provider uses a tracker tariff which can change every half hour (it does have a maximum cap to prevent the issues seen in Texas). Prices are currently negative, so every kWh I use right now means the electricity company pays me. Nuclear promised energy which was "too cheap to meter". But solar actually delivered.
- jonatron 6mo agoBatteries are getting affordable too - Fogstar do a 16kWh battery for around £2000. Plus, grid scale iron-air batteries sound promising.
- thebruce87m 6mo agoHave you got one? Looking for installation options.
- ahhhhnoooo 6mo agoIf you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery? It seems silly, but actually... it's driving useful behavior I suppose. Then again, maybe a good government would notice this and just fast track grid storage rather than distribute that work to all the citizens.
- fhn 6mo agoSure you could. How much do you think they will pay you per kw? 1/10 what you paid them and they will charge you for using their infrastructure..at least in the US they do.
- jonatron 6mo ago> If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery? Yes, some people do this. There's even a startup built around the idea: https://www.axle.energy/ https://www.axle.energy/
- fhn 6mo agoSo everything should be cheaper right...RIGHT?
- heyitsmedotjayb 6mo agoUK is legally required to set the price of electricity to whichever generator has the highest cost - which is natural gas. Its called marginal cost pricing.
- toomuchtodo 6mo agoAre there any efforts to fix this?
- nagisa 6mo agoMore renewables and batteries so that gas generators wouldn't have any leftover capacity to bid for.
- heyitsmedotjayb 6mo agoI believe that no governing party has attempted to fix this. Generally - this set up benefits the oil/gas lobby, so efforts to change it will butt heads with them. UK also trades energy with mainland Europe, which can add a complication with how prices are set.
- ufmace 6mo agoWhy should they? It's not the right time for that yet. Letting the price stay high despite renewable prices being lower means it's tremendously profitable to build new renewable sources, so there's lots of incentive for it to be done.
- heyitsmedotjayb 6mo agoThere's no incentive... Why invest in a less reliable source if you could endlessly purchase gas power for the same price? It slows the transition from fossil fuels and ensures that oil and gas never takes a loss.
- martinald 6mo agoThe issue though is that the UK spends something along the lines of £10-25bn (depending how you count subsidies) a year on renewable. Something like £10bn in direct subsidies via CfD and RO, then another ~£1.5-2bn on curtailment (paying wind farms to turn off), ~£3bn in balancing market costs, and £6bn on transmission upgrade costs (passed back to consumers/businesses) to upgrade transmission for nearly always renewable projects. There's actually a lot of others I think you could attribute to renewables but I could spend all day writing about this. My guess is that £20bn/year is a fair cost overall in subsidy payments. This is clearly not offset by natural gas fuel savings even with elevated prices. The UK IMO made a couple of critical mistakes. Firstly, far too much offshore wind is in Scotland when it should have been closer to population centres in England. A few factors for this but the issue is planning is devolved to Scotland (so they have every incentive to approve as many) but energy subsidies are set by Westminster. By the time UK central government realised this it was too late (or they didn't want to rock the cart for political reasons post/during Scottish independence referendum). We're now having to pay £20-30bn+ to get Scottish wind generation down to England where it is needed (primarily through new 5 (!) 2GW HVDCs from Scotland to England). It would have been far far better just to... build those wind farms closer to England. This would have still required grid upgrades but far cheaper ones (bringing it 100-200km to population centres instead of all the way from Scotland, plus you still need to do the ones in England on top of that for the most part to get it from the HVDC landing sites to the population centres). The second major issue is there is definitely massive diminishing returns from adding more renewables at this point. There's too many renewables on the grid a lot of the time, even if transmission was perfect - supply is outstripping demand. Instead of building more and more generation the subsidies should be redirected towards storage projects. But overall, for the same £20bn a year you could have probably built 5 Hinckley Point C sized 3.2GW nuclear plants concurrently (assuming £4bn a year capex for 10 years). In 20 years you'd have probably 30GW of nuclear built, which should cover nearly all electricity demand in the UK in that time, with very limited transmission costs (existing nuclear plants have good grid connections and you build them close to them). And importantly, you would basically eliminate _any_ dependence on gas from the UK grid. Clearly nuclear has risks in project delivery, but at least it's reliable once built.
- ndr42 6mo ago
- turblety 6mo agoThis is amazing news. I look forward to my bills going up again next month!
- ZeroGravitas 6mo agoWhy are people making (intentionally?) vague statements about prices going up? Are you referring to the war Trump started, or are you all climate denying loons who love Trump and think net-zero is a Chinese hoax? Or just nihilists that just think the world is going to shit in multiple ways and refuse to even contemplate small silver linings on dark clouds? It's impossible to tell from these quips.
- gopher_space 6mo agoThese are people attempting to convince themselves.
- blitzar 6mo agoOnly 3 certainties in life; death, taxes and the cost of everything going up every year.
- benj111 6mo agoAnd people not being able to count apparently...
- skippyboxedhero 6mo agoI believe Centrica did some research before the Iran war and found that if we were able to get gas for free, energy bills wouldn't fall and would actually rise over the next few years (because of the mix towards structurally high cost supply). It says something that the people running the monopoly cash machine are asking questions about bankrupting their customers/ability to pay but politicians are shutting their eyes and pounding onto the accelerator. What a world.