All this means lots of fluctuations in power availability and cost. Pretending that it costs the same all the time everywhere is irrational. If you give people incentives to adapt to these fluctuations, they will. Energy providers like Octopus prove that at scale. They by the way are a big proponent of more localized power. Because it's just more optimal.
Price incentives cause people and companies to adapt their behavior. Including when to to use power and where to use power. Likewise, it incentivizes power companies to invest in power generation where the demand is instead of where the NIMBY's are not (like Scottland). Speaking of NIMBY's, if they could benefit from lower pricing, they'd probably love wind power a lot more. Buy more electric cars, do the laundry when it's windy, etc.
As for base load. Nobody ever specifies a number in GW or GWH. It's a very fuzzy notion that people just assert is needed in huge (unspecified) amounts. If you put actual numbers on it, you would be able to have a sane discussion on (much) cheaper alternatives. But that never happens. Most discussions around base load center on the notion that we allegedly need a lot of it. What's the budget we need to reserve for that? How much? When? Where? Why? Are there any alternatives? The debate is mostly completely irrational and hand wavy on this.
There is a basic notion that power companies don't mind charging the same rate nationally because that means they make lots of money charging for mostly cheap power available everywhere except in a handful of places. The way the system works is that everybody pays the highest price on the system. Localized prices would introduce lots of variation and cause lots of reasons for power companies to optimize their power delivery and pricing. High prices mean unhappy customers voting with their feet. They are being shielded from that currently.
It's a big reason they are resisting changes on this front. In some cases they actually get paid to not generate power or discard it. That's wasteful. Scottland has plenty of base load. They are exporting their power surplus most of the time.
The UK has a lot of combined cycle gas burners. You will sometimes see US claims that these generators are only baseload and it wouldn't make sense to throttle them up and down. Over the course of an ordinary day in Britain you might see power output from these "baseload" generators vary between 2GW and 20GW and it's no big deal.
Maybe just wrong though :P
It would likely converge on wind farm strike prices plus margin, so about 10p/kWh .. if you lived in Scotland or near the coast. Being a localized market I would expect to see higher prices in London.
But there's also a risk of spikes. You'd probably want a regulatory guarantee of maximum prices, I think during the Texas crisis it got over $100/unit at one point.
On a handful of days - such as yesterday [2] which was very windy - prices fell as low as -2.6p at 03:30
For comparison, a 'regular' energy supplier will charge 23.47p/kWh for anytime use.
[1] https://agilebuddy.uk/historic/agile/2024/11/22 [2] https://agilebuddy.uk/historic/agile/2024/11/24
So you generally pay more unless you become nocturnal or unemployed/homemaker?
And to quote the person to whom I replied: "If you put actual numbers on it, you would be able to have a sane discussion "
There is often an implication or assertion that the tech to enable surge pricing will actually enable way cheaper energy. So I want to know the estimated unit prices.
Every decision is a trade-off. The trade-off here is between on the one hand the savings from additional network reinforcement, the savings from reduction in aggregate Dx/Tx costs, and increasing the optimality of placement of generation wrt load; on the other hand, the cost of renewables generation being placed in areas with lower potential, the cost of increased price instability due to smaller markets, and of course, the switching costs. There is also the question of what incentives a zonal electricity market would actually provide to renewables developers.
With regards to the network reinforcement savings, it is worth noting a few things. A major obstacle to increasing network reinforcement is not the intrinsic investment cost, but inadequate and restrictive planning, which, the grid being a natural monopoly, results in artificially constrained connection supply (not out of malice but policy failure). Just as an illustration, the way DNOs currently determine whether to pay for flexibility services or upgrade the network is done on the basis of a _5 year_ calculation (ludicrously short!). The current waiting lists for new grid connections are on the order of a decade. Fundamentally, there is a short-sightedness in the planning system, and the long term is catching up.
As for the optimality of placement of assets, price signals already exist to reflect local needs -- there isn't exactly one single price for electricity for the whole of the UK (though it's a decent approximation). Transmission and distribution costs are baked into the settlement system. For grid constraints, both distribution and transmission use of system charges vary in space and time to reflect constraints (and flexibility services also introduce a local price signal, although I have earlier expressed skepticism of the procurement process).
If these price signals exist, why don't they cause renewables generation to become more distributed across the UK? The answer is that they probably do, but that grid losses are just smaller than the increased capacity factor of building in Scotland. Grid losses (both Dx and Tx) is on the order of 10%, and wind farms in Scotland will have a capacity factor about 30-40% greater.
Finally, to touch on the incentives question. The justification for pay-as-clear pricing (which is what you refer to as paying the highest price on the system) is actually to _incentivize_ the construction of cheaper, _renewable_ and nuclear energy. Sure, it doesn't especially disincentivize the construction of marginally-priced gas plants, but it doesn't incentivize it either. You could argue that maybe power companies are keeping this market structure to profit from their renewable assets instead of moving the whole grid to renewable, except for a simple fact: there is no monopoly on power generation in the UK.
Let me be clear: I am not actually arguing against zonal pricing. There are plenty of good arguments being made by people who have studied this more closely than me. What I'm fundamentally trying to do is provide a different perspective: that there is a lower-hanging fruit in the form of improving grid planning, a point which may be argued. But it is _not_ a simple problem with an obvious solution that's only being held back due to a conspiracy of energy suppliers.
There's a number of projects in the connection queue that are speculative - in many cases, people applying for a connection, then sitting on it to resell. Thankfully, a lot of these "zombie" projects are getting ejected from the queue due to some recent reforms, so we might see those 10+ year connection dates move down.
Running hydro, biogas (e.g. in Denmark) and offshore wind (UK, Spain, France, Italy) can definitely fulfill base load demand on the basis of renewable energy generation. With solar, enough overcapacity can guarantee base load during the day even when it's cloudy, and in the summer the solar overcapacity can be used to run synth-fuel plants for those things that we absolutely cannot run with electricity (ships and large airplanes).
Additionally, we can reduce base load demand during night time... a lot of places are still running incandescent lighting, for example. Replace that with LEDs, better reflectors (for less waste) and movement detectors, and you tackle light pollution at night at the same time. Or heat, add storage to a heat pump system to avoid having to run the heat pump at night. And for fucks sake France please get rid of resistive heating.
This seems entirely region dependant, but even so, I think a citation is needed here.
I know there are poster children for renewables, like Iceland which struck the energy lottery. But I don't know of many places other than that which can satisfy base load today with renewables unless you're going hyper-local.
Or was your point that we could do it if we threw billions at the problem?
Your entire second paragraph is basically "throw money at it" when, sadly, the politics (which are reflective of the will of the majority) of the world seem to be instead moving in the opposite direction.
Currently, petrochemicals might be:
-Benefiting from consumer-focused subsidies, like heating or energy assistance.
-Subsidized by, like, actual intentional industrial subsidies
-Subsidized by infrastructure investments, like a road out to some hinterlands that is only needed to get to some mine, pipeline, or whatever
-Subsidized by allowing these companies to externalize their costs onto society by dumping them on the environment. All those greenhouse gasses, cleaning them up isn’t going to be free, and we’re going to pay for it.
-Subsidized by international relations. This isn’t a political site, so let’s not dig into the details there. But the long dependency chains for petrochemicals have made some odd international relations bedfellows. These constraints on our diplomatic options have a cost that is hard to capture.
We could start by making sure to price all that in to petrochemicals if we wanted to give ourselves a ton of extra homework (actually we shouldn’t try to run the numbers because it is big country-dependent mess, but we should at least have the size of the picture in our heads).
Renewables have fewer built-in, structural, or snuck-in by negligence subsidies like that. They don’t produce as many toxic byproducts to dump on the planet (though, semiconductors aren’t byproduct-free for sure), and energy falling from the sky is easier to just grab without any drama. So, I think if it were possible to actually run those numbers, renewables would look pretty good.
Then we add in the fact that renewables probably are the future (eventually we will run out of oil). So, subsidies for renewable R&D are an investment that should pay off with future manufacturing jobs.
Overall, sticking with petrochemicals seems very expensive to me.
For that, you need forward-thinking politicians who can dance the subtle dance of planning for the future without making the current situation too onerous for the people. The recent election results in the USA is an example of getting that dance wrong.
where did you read that? e.g. in the US politics = top 10%
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
What is renewable base load demand?
This latter storage mode isn't needed until fossil fuels are almost entirely eliminated from the grid, since otherwise just use those instead for that long term firming.
The idea that the electricity supply system has to itself shoulder the burden of dealing with intermittency is also mistaken. If it's worthwhile users will be willing to dispatch at least some of their demand. I'm reminded of the argument against deregulation of telecom or airlines: that the new system wouldn't be as reliable or nice. But users were willing to make the tradeoff if the services were cheaper.
Because France has a massive dependency on nuclear power... of course resistive heaters are cheaper than anything else when you got a ton of NPPs around. But their plants are all aging and are a nightmare to keep operational, so if they'd switch over to heat pumps their total energy demand would go down drastically.
No "of course" about that, especially with current heat pump technology and the fully loaded cost of power from new nuclear power plants.