Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?
climate.benjames.io
climate.benjames.io
Another point to make is that the national wholesale price of power in the UK is based on the price of the most expensive thing in the market at any point. Which now that they shut down coal is usually gas which at this point the UK mostly imports because gas production in the North Sea fields has been petering out. It no longer is the cheap resource it once was.
Even Scotland which either exports or curtails dirt cheap wind power most of the time gets to pay expensive gas rates for their power. Why is power curtailment a thing there? Because there is no price incentive to use the power. Otherwise people might be doing sane things like charging their EVs, powering their heat pumps, etc. Instead Scotland imports gas for heating and petrol for driving their cars. At the same time they curtail wind power by the GW.
Greg Jackson from Octopus (who are the largest energy operator in the UK) has been calling for this for some time. I don't live there but his name comes up a lot in several of the clean energy podcasts I follow. Smart person that has a lot of sensible things to say on this topic.
While I sympathise with the notion of zonal pricing, there are side-effects to making the change, especially when power is intermittent e.g. https://www.uksteel.org/steel-news-2024/businesses-write-to-... . I'm not sure what the correct metric is.
> the national wholesale price of power in the UK is based on the price of the most expensive thing in the market at any point
How much of the electricity demand goes through a bilateral agreement (or one where generation and retail are the same organisation, like EDF)? Also I seem to recall that the "pay the highest accepted bidder model" used to be argued as lowering the bids, resulting in a lower cost to the consumer!
Marginal cost based pricing is extremely unintuitive to those outside of the field, but nearly all economists support it. The reason is that this eliminates a lot of the gaming in pay-as-bid designs and helps incentivize investment in more efficient/cheaper generation, while driving out less efficient clunkers that may not be profitable anymore. The reality is of course far more complicated. These markets have saved untold amounts of money by optimizing over large regions, but you can also point out "missing money" problems where there simply isn't enough investment in generators with access to firm fuel (as opposed to when we just had monopoly utilities). As a result, much of the US has an "at risk" or "very high risk" of not having enough generation during summer/winter peak.
Give me an example of a "missing money" problem. I don't think these problems exist when you have capacity markets or ancillary service markets with enough incentives to exist (e.g. payments for standing offline, ready to turn on).
The big issue with UK power markets is that there is no incentive to build a huge power line down the country right now that delivers power from Scotland (where there are huge wind resources) to the rest of the country. Texas did this (very very successfully) with the CREZ.
The UK has many many competent engineers and making the energy grid more efficient is an attractive opportunity for many.
PPAs typically require the bank to be counterparty and that requires a forecast of the prices that will be received in the market over a lengthy period. The folks at Ofgem talked about how going nodal would be nice, but that they are worried about it being such a big project (these markets typically take 5-7 years to go from design to implementation in the US) that would take focus away from what is already mostly working for them. Overall, completely changing the market structure leads to uncertainty that investors don't like.
The grandfather point is a good one. Something could possibly be done there, but not sure of the complications.
The missing money problem is very much a real thing. You're right that capacity markets and other resource adequacy mechanisms create side payments to fix this, but not everyone has that. Texas infamously had an energy-only design that hasn't worked out so well and is why they have so many ongoing proposals like the PCM to address the reliability issues. It is also why fast start pricing has been pushed so hard by FERC. Even with the capacity markets, there are numerous issues such as the extremely high prices in PJM that is leading to numerous lawsuits and condemnation from their independent market monitor. The markets work well at reducing costs, but there are a lot of ongoing issues being addressed in numerous stakeholder groups and at FERC.
Am I misunderstanding what you mean by counterparty? In the US, banks provide the tax equity and sometimes the project finance, but the PPA counterparty is a consumer, i.e. a utility or a large load (e.g. tech company data center). The forecast is necessary, but like I said, the uncertainty can be hedged.
Well, I'm talking about how linking a nodal market to a capacity or ancillary service market is necessary (i.e. purely nodal market without payments for reliability don't make sense). Texas's energy-only design would not have been saved from the 2021 disaster via a capacity market or a zonal price (gas availability dropped by 45%).
I think the PCM was always misguided and unnecessary (from just cursory understanding). I don't have time to respond to all the points about various capacity markets, but unfortunately a busy time of year, and will respond later.
I could have been more clear. There are many kinds of PPAs, but my understanding talking to the banks that do the financing is that they are an integral part of helping the developer get the steel in the ground. I agree there is almost always an off-taker that provides the fixed payment in exchange for the market payment. I agree the uncertainty can be hedged to a degree, but was just relaying what was said by the key folks representing the argument against nodal in parliament (think that's the right venue). The additional revenue uncertainty complicates things and slows things down.
I agree purely nodal markets don't make sense without some reliability mechanism, but that's not what many of the key academics were preaching/advocating not too long ago and why Texas did what it did. The Texas grid may have done better had they stuck to the older vertically integrated model which may have led to some older units staying around. It's hard to rewind in order to fully tell. I'd have to go pull a lot of figures to see if they retired coal that would have stuck around absent the markets. There surely wouldn't have been the bankruptcy fiascos from having $9000/MWh prices for a week, but that's another topic. I also think the courts are still looking into claims of market manipulation coming from the natural gas industry during Uri.
There is certainly a lot to talk about on PCM. Would love to chat later! Have a good holiday.
I've got a lot of time for Octopus, which is an odd thing to say about a utility company. It's amazing how much of a difference it can make when a company makes it a. pretty easy to speak to someone when you have a problem or question (especially via email) and b. getting that problem sorted or question answered isn't so arduous you want to jump off a bridge. It once took me six months to convince British Gas to actually start charging me for my gas and electric.
Plus every time there's a price cap change or something out of the ordinary going on, they send out emails explaining it in plain English (including, as you say, reiterating the case that our pricing model is utterly daft). They also have an API for customers so you can pull your usage data, which is pretty neat.
Octopus have started doing things like connecting properties in the north to cellular type meters (not supposed to) or using Octopus Mini hubs (connects smart meters using WiFi) as a way of trying to solve the problems
See https://www.nve.no/norwegian-energy-regulatory-authority/ret...
Oddly enough I interviewed with them a few years ago (before I was a customer) and came away pretty unimpressed, I turned the offer down.
but i called them to sign up, and they told me my house was two apartments. it isn't. it never has been. and when i asked them to update their data, the operator said that isn't something she can do.
i would be a customer otherwise. sigh.
Braindead Germany just woke up and decided that they want to do away with nuclear and suck the icy cold teats of Mother Russia.
Wind isn't suited for inland Germany, especially in a place like Bavaria, which has the frickking Black Forest ecosystem and a mountainous terrain. Not to mention the winds are much slower there than in North Germany. For the cost calculus that wind energy provides, it's best suited for underutilized offshore areas or desert climates.
Germany forcing wind power is basically a sorry excuse they have to compensate for their energy shortfall - wind and solar can be deployed relatively faster, but of course solar doesn't make sense in Germany, hence the government is trying to shove down wind.
> which has the frickking Black Forest ecosystem
Bavaria has forests, but not the Black Forest. The Black Forest is in Baden Württemberg.
> and a mountainous terrain
Bavaria is more mountainous than northern Germany for sure, but not all of Bavaria is the alps.
> Not to mention the winds are much slower there than in North Germany. For the cost calculus that wind energy provides, it's best suited for underutilized offshore areas or desert climates.
I often see this argued, often with people citing ground wins speeds to support their statement. However, at 100m public records to show sufficient wind speeds to justify the investment in many cases. Of course offshore wind is always going to have a lower LCoE than onshore wind, but in southern states like Bavaria transmission bottlenecks and redispatch are also a concern (by the way, both of witch are exasperated by the lack of investment in transmission networks).
> but of course solar doesn't make sense in Germany,
This is just a factually wrong statement. Solar does make sense ans the business case is just getting stronger with the falling panel and storage costs. I have a residential installation (the least cost and energy effective solution) and I cover most of my electricity needs from my roof in 10 out of 12 months. People love to reference the two months to demonstrate that it is useless, but that’s a bit like saying your house is useless because you’re not at home for 10 hours a day.
Why the heck are people arguing about energy markets in the EU?
And that too, specifically, Germany ?
Is it targeting green energy? Is it targeting Germany ? What, why ?
> And that too, specifically, Germany ?
The discourse around the energy market in Germany is mostly centered around the inequality of the German energy market. Germany is a single price zone. However, this price is only the bidding price on the electricity market. In addition to the energy price, there are taxes and network transfer fees (Netzentgelte) that make up the final electricity price that is paid by the consumer. In the northern states the network fees are pretty high because of the high amount of wind turbines being connected to the grid, so the consumers in the northern states pay comparatively expensive prices, especially considering the vast amount of cheap wind energy that is in available in their network regions [0].
In southern states like Bavaria the network fees are less of an issue, resulting in lower energy prices overall (which sometimes makes sense because Bavaria has a lot of solar power installed). The north (eastern) states are also economically relatively weak, so the impression is that these regions essentially subsidize the "cheap" electricity for the economically well off states in southern Germany, hindering the development of new industries in those states.
Beyond those issues there is also the ever increasing cost for redispatch which is placing an increasing burden on electricity consumers [1]
> Is it targeting green energy
In Germany it is certainly targeting the green energy by proxy and the green party in particular. German politics has been a pretty shitshow ever since I turned old enough the care, but the last 3 years were super bad.
> Is it targeting Germany ?
I think Germany in particular is targeted largely because of the decision to phase out nuclear power. This is a decision that is for some reason widely unpopular nowadays, even with people who celebrated the decision 10 years ago. The stuttering transformation in Germany probably also has some side effects in countries that we're (re-) importing from, namely raising the prices due to higher demand.
With the power of hindsight you can argue that exiting coal before nuclear would have been a smarter play, but here we are.
TL;DR: Energy grid transformation is a bit of a (political) shitshow
[0]: German https://www.stromauskunft.de/strompreise/strompreis-atlas/
[1]: German https://www.ews-schoenau.de/blog/artikel/steigende-kosten-du...
But German energy policy?????
Thanks for the info.
Yeah that already was a mess before 2022 and only turned worse since then. And remember, what I outlined is only the surface of the electricity generation debate. It gets even worse when you turn towards mobility and heating. Oh you will hear some wild takes there!
So weird. And I’m definitely not in the market for wild takes.
While offshore wind has gotten cheaper over time, onshore wind is still cheapest. Danish LCOE in 2018 for onshore wind is 30 Euros/MWh while offshore is 46 Euros/MWh. https://ens.dk/en/press/danish-energy-agency-launches-improv...
Brain fart moment, I guess you're right. But Bavaria still has plentiful forests for the argument to be valid.
> This is just a factually wrong statement. Solar does make sense ans the business case is just getting stronger with the falling panel and storage costs.
The business case is getting stronger because of a self-inflicted wound. You guys have ballooning energy costs in Germany by sole virtue of your own policies, even though you had the panacea to those issues earlier. It's like handling a toothache with clove oil and herbs when you should be getting a root canal, even though you're rich enough to afford that.
I for one would love to see German heavy industry run on solar power. Even the cost justification won't make sense and you know that.
Europe in general is one of the worst parts of the world for renewable energy, but this just means that in a post-fossil fuel, renewable powered world, Europe will be at a competitive disadvantage in energy intensive industries, and nuclear will not save them vs. industries in sunnier places.
1. window power is not "dirt cheap" because of the rates the wind farms get paid. As you said they get paid the wholesale rate, and IIRC it is the greater of the wholesale rate and a minimum rate they are guaranteed by the government.
2. the reason curtailment happens UK's is because there is a lack of grid capacity to take it where it is needed. Most of the wind generating capacity is in Scotland, which has about 10% of the UK's population. This part of the problem would be helped by cheaper rates when there is excess energy, but increasing the use of wind power would mean higher bills because of 1.
The cost of fixing this will mean building grid capacity, so it means higher electricity bills.
There is a good explanation here: https://climate.benjames.io/uk-electricity-bills/
The TL;DR version is we built wind power when it was expensive, subsidised it at those prices, and now are stuck with paying for it at those prices.
I was briefly a customer of theirs in the US while they were still doing variable/index/wholesale rates. They wrote a good article about this:
https://octopusenergy.com/blog/index-prices-are-under-threat...
Reagan ended it on day one with an Executive Order to repeal the controls. The lines disappeared overnight and never returned.
We had lines in 73 following OPEC's response to western involvement in Yom Kippur war. We had lines again in 79 when Iran's oil dropped out of the market. I can't recall gas lines (or reports thereof) during the intervening time. Searching didn't turn anything up.
(Anecdotally, I hung out with the Jan-Feb 1979 tractorcade. They came in from all over. Fuel prices were a concern but not availability.)
The latter spurred conservation. 1979's sharp oil price increases peaked in July 1980. Oil prices then began a long and steady fall, until the precipitous fall in Dec 1985.
Gas prices increase sharply in 1979, again in 1980 and again in 1981. In 1982 they drop to the highs that were set in 1980 and stay there, untethered to continually dropping oil prices. Until 1986, anyway.
The day after Reagan signed the EO, the lines disappeared. I have never seen them since. I pull right up to the pump every time. That's with the prices going up and down pretty much daily.
I'm sorry you went through that for so long. For us schmoes, gas lines were a fading memory by Jan 81.
We haven't seen particularly rapidly growing demand as energy efficiency improvements and the closure of heavy industry has offset the general increase in energy intensity which happens over time as economies grow.
It's also not like there is no locational signal in the current system - the costs which large generators and large consumers pay to use the transmission network do depend in part on where they are connected and how much of the peak network capacity need they are responsible for (so called "triad charges").
There are also significant revenue incentives for building embedded (ie distribution-connected) generation.
Ultimately it's hard to avoid the fact that we closed down old reliable coal and gas generation without having the right replacements in place. Governments of all political stripes didn't want to take decisions (eg on new nuclear especially but also things like pumped storage hydro) because it was easier to pretend these changes were cost free.
0. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/assessment-locational-...
A silver lining at least. I’m old, so won’t see the benefits of this I’m sure, but it’s still nice to know we’ve made some tangible progress toward a cleaner future
as long as non-western countries keep polluting - even if we achieve net-zero nothing will change other than us feeling better and patting ourselves in the back.
a) The transition to clean energy, transportation etc by Western countries funds the development and investment in new technologies. These then filter down to developing countries when the economies of scale kick in e.g. solar panels, electric cars.
b) There are also other benefits to cleaner solutions than just trying to achieve net-zero. Reductions in pollution reduce morbidity, improve productivity, improve happiness, secure food supply etc.
China has made impressive bounds in R&D but still lags in many fields of scientific research. Much of their research output is derivative in my experience of reading a fair bit of research articles in several fields.
However China does lead in many fields of manufacturing. The western countries are far behind in there. That is important in terms of global leadership in renewable energy.
b) Majority of the early R&D in solar, EVs etc came from the US. China has been vital in driving unit economics.
what about population? as that's the main driving factor for pollution - especially if you couple that with energy needs.
If you use PPP rather than nominal GDP China is actually the biggest and the EU the third biggest.
Also worth noting that, despite expansion, the EU was a smaller proportion of the worth economy before the UK left, than the EEC was after Britain joined. The trend is very much away from the West.
Although having said that, I do note this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/11/china-...
Why do people believe they're operating in good faith?
Its not "going to renewables". It's building the fastest amount of renewable generation, but that's new capacity, not replacement. It's also building the most coal plants and nuclear plants and anything else. It's all new capacity.
Same with cars. Most EVs and most ICes.
China is growing, and is doing so in all directions.
They mean the rate of reduction in the metric graphed above.
https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/poland-energ...
The UKs peak carbon per kWh was at some point. Since then it's dropped at a percentage rate higher than anywhere else.
The biggest thing has been the elimination of coal even if it's with natural gas as it's a much cleaner fuel. It's still a fossil fuel, but burns with much less pollution.
The UK has 30GW of wind capacity. Two weeks ago wind was generating 1.8GW (5% of demand at the time). The benefits of a power source are only somewhat theoretical when you can't rely on it being there when you need it.
you won't see it because you'll be enjoying one of those lovely blackouts we'll get when we turn off all the AGRs and didn't build more nuclear
The average US household uses 10,000 kWh annually ~833 kWh per month. So I'm guessing most Americans reading the article and looking at the interactive graph are thinking either: this is very cheap or very expensive, depending on whether they are assuming it's monthly or annual.
In the US the average price for 3100 kWh in California would be $1062 which is among the highest in the continental US. So right in line with GB.
In New York it would be $710. Florida it would be $454.
So it's high, but not as eye-watering as it seemed to me initially.
If you switch out the gas boiler for a heat pump, it can still heat the hot water and heat the central heating loop. But it can't provide cooling that way. There is no infrastructure in most houses to run AC ducting or refrigerant pipes.
You might think that you could simply cool the water in the central heating loop, and therefore make all of the radiators very cold, and use that to move heat out of rooms. In theory that might work, but in most houses these central heating pipes are not insulated and run under floorboards. If you make them cold then they'll cause condensation, leading to water in all kinds of small spaces, and likely leading to warping, damage, or mould.
In the UK, retrofitting AC into an existing house is a huge undertaking in most cases.
Yanis Varoufakis discusses it at length here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3bo-s_OY4Q
He characterises the energy market as a scam. I tend to agree.
"The Carbon Price Support (CPS), introduced by the UK Government in April 2013, has led to a substantial reduction in electricity generated from coal, which fell by 93% from a monthly average of 13.1 TWh in 2013 to only 0.97 TWh in 2019 (Ofgem, 2019a)."
They actually correctly priced the externalities and managed to decimate coal usage in the UK in a single decade. This increased prices accordingly.
This should be applauded, they correctly designed a scheme so that the economics aligned and coal was quickly removed. We can now focus on increasing energy production from other means and decreasing prices.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/sustainable/sites/bartlett/fi...
It's ironic that it's quite a bit cheaper to use natural gas here, since we're supposed to convert to electricity to save the planet.
Whether those people rebuild in Paradise, CA or move somewhere else with the money they received from the settlement is an entirely different proposition. This is not "subsidizing people in the country side". PG&E fucked up and now they have to pay. PG&E is choosing to pass the cost to its customers rather than eating into its profits, which is a decision that California allowed them to make.
EDIT: You and the GP I originally replied to seem to be making the argument that after PG&E burned all these people's homes down they should have been allowed to just tell them to get bent so your utility bill wouldn't go up in the city? What happens when it's /your/ home that gets burnt down? "Sorry bucko, but your house is worth $0 as it's just now a smoldering ruin. No soup for you. - Thanks PG&E"
What PGE did was terrible, but also there's a lot to blame on CA directly too.
But I will say that Paradise was in a bad state prior to the fire, simply nobody knew how bad. While a wildfire like that wasn't guaranteed, they were just one bad lightning strike away from the same disaster.
Funding FEMA, forest management services, and wildfire fighters something that isn't always prioritized and it should be.
It was a 100 year old C hook that caused the fire. Which failed in high winds. Which drove the fire. It was PG&E's responsibility to know "how bad" this was. They literally lost track of their own transmission lines.
Fundamentally the problem can be solved with management and engineering. It's entirely PG&E's fault. This was adjudicated and settled.
(plus see tristors answer as to it being passed on and not coming from profits)
Then PG&E takes the money, leaves 100 year old equipment in place, which inevitably breaks, and burns down an entire forest along with their homes.
You genuinely think these people are being "subsidized" by all this? That it's their fault the PG&E top brass didn't earn a bonus that year?
Meanwhile everyone in Sacramento can buy federally subsidized flood insurance. The federal government also built the levees surrounding the county. The entire downtown core had to be jacked up several feet due to persistent flooding. Should everyone in Sacramento move too? Should we end the insurance subsidy?
Wait till you read the facts behind this $41m bailout for 20 homes in one of the richest burbs of LA: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-29/feds-to-...
You could argue that nobody should be living in a place guaranteed to be destroyed, whether by landslides or wildfires, but the government tried that in Palos Verdes and got sued, lost, and now is bailing out those homeowners to get out of services obligations all the same.
Suffice it to say, you have bought into a very well marketed point of view. There was a lot of ceremony to enact procedural blame on PG&E, but it obscures all the far simpler solutions, that are far more just. People in San Francisco are paying higher rates, no? So PG&E may have been responsible for something somewhere, but the liability is being borne functionally by taxpayers, via a compulsory payment for energy, to balance the books on assholes living in places at risk of wildfires with overinflated asset values. Ultimately, the government here has decided that you should get government-guaranteed-risk-free market rate returns on owner occupied real estate.
Yes. As I recall it, the fire was caused by downed lines that were energized during a dry spell, and the reason the lines were downed was due to negligence around maintaining the C-Hooks holding their high voltage transmission lines. PG&E knew that they needed to be replaced every so often, had a policy that dictated when they needed to be replaced, and then ignored that policy which ultimately allowed a C-Hook to fail and the energized line to start the fire. In fact, PG&E had commissioned a study as far back as 1987 to look into this issue and confirmed that these hooks had a limited lifespan.
They had clear knowledge of the issue. They had a responsibility to maintain the system to prevent the issue. They set policies around how that maintenance should be conducted. Then they willfully ignored their own policies, which lead to the issue they were responsible to prevent. That's textbook negligence.
So, yes, PG&E /did/ cause the fire. They were negligent in doing so. They are liable for the damages.
Or another way to put it, how much liability would you give the RV drivers in these two scenarios?
https://www.kktv.com/2024/07/23/rv-with-blown-tire-sparks-se...
There are so many smart people on this forum. How hard is it to understand the spelled-out-in-the-law relationship between your compulsory payment for electricity rising and the cost of the settlements?
You can't avoid legal ramifications by saying _something_ was bound to happen
Legally, maybe you are right. I honestly don't know. It doesn't seem right to me though.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/new-images-of-pge-...
> Hong estimates that his home would have been worth about $3.6 million two years ago
Yeah, this person who was able to afford a $3.6M home sure sounds like "our most vulnerable" people. He needs a bailout for making a poor decision on buying that house in a place prone to landslides. Not the hungry kids in our schools whose parents can't afford/won't provide healthy meals.
We got money for millionaires but not hungry kids and people with chronic medical needs.
> "We’re committed to staying,” Reeves, 81, said. “We’re pretty financially committed now.”
> They are weeks into a major renovation after a fissure forced apart rooms in their home.
Their home is constantly being torn apart by the ground and yet they're committed to staying. Insanity.
It is. Insane all ratepayers are shouldering all the cost to rebuild rich people's mansions.
But sure, keep telling me their new mansion on quicksand needs a bailout and they're far more needful than hungry malnourished kids.
> now they're a teacher or something who owns a multi-million dollar home while living on 80k a year or something.
TBH, if their home is now worth millions, they should retire and move someplace cheaper. The market is telling them that land is worth way more than a lifetime of their earnings. They should capitalize on that. They're still far weather people that he vast majority of Americans, and probably the top 0.001% of people on Earth. That they failed to cash their lotto ticket in time before their mansion on the quicksand fell apart leaves me zero sympathy.
I wish I could fail at cashing in my $3.6M lotto ticket I bought for relative pennies. At least I would have been given the chance, no?
You could certainly argue that some sort of fire was inevitable, and that the fire would have been much less damaging if people hadn’t built their houses in such bad places.
But the law doesn’t really care about that. You can’t avoid liability by arguing what would have happened or what should have happened. If your negligence causes a fire and that fire destroys a house, you’re liable for it regardless.
California has contribitory negligence. If the court determined it was negligent to build or keep a house in these places and that contributed to the loss, it must determine the share of loss attributable to each party and reduce the award. In some states, a party must have be less than half at fault to receive compensation, but California doesn't have a minimum, if you are 99% at fault and the other party is 1%, you can get 1% of your loss compensated.
PGE costs have gone up because the state's Public Utilities Commission and many of our leaders in Sacramento are in bed with PGE. PGE has been vastly underinvesting in infrastructure development and maintenance for the last 50 years, which is at least partially the PUC's fault by letting them take profits instead of forcing them to either lower rates or reinvest. The Camp Fire shined a light on the neglect, now they have to play catch up on 50 years of deferred maintenance in many quite remote areas.
Local Sacramento ABC Station actually does some decent investigative report on this. If you are interested there is a fair amount of content to go through, as they started the investigation in 2022, the series is called Fire Power Money.
But: the settlement's law traded on the exact empathy you do right now.
Here's where we disagree: what evidence do you need to see to be convinced that nobody should be living in your community? Harsh words right? It's the exact opposite of the empathy you are trying to get through, that I appreciate.
I think smart people struggle with climate science, viewing it as strictly a set of facts, when in fact it is deeply political: it is telling us where we can and cannot live, which is as powerful as violence-protected borders.
We have pretty unequivocal evidence that tells us on the time scales of realizing real estate returns, some communities will be "worth" "$0."
Do you think we should have insurance of last resort in California? Insurers read the same scientific studies and don't protect people's homes from wildfires. It is basically immaterial in the long term which human activity causes the wildfire - as you say, the settlement is in the rear view mirror - it could have been a gender reveal party that started the flame, and then, what would you do, make that person personally liable for billions of dollars? It would be bailout all the same, poorly administered, because it is simply impossible to not "absolutely shaft" someone who says their home is worth $700k when it is actually worth $0.
It costs $42m to just bail out 20 homes in Palos Verdes, a community with very politically powerful people. It's a slow motion crisis in California.
Do you think we should bail out all the home owners in San Francisco, who bought their homes at $40,000, pay tiny Prop 13 dynastically protected rates and therefore pay little taxes to their own community, and have things nominally worth $1.4m, when an earthquake hits? That's not your community, and suddenly, oh man, that sounds expensive, man, you don't have bottomless empathy for that community. Should nobody be living in San Francisco because of the earthquake risk? Tough question.
So what if I spin some narrative that someone somewhere is responsible or liable? It is impossible for any entity to pay off all those people, including the government - it couldn't even compensate the 10x fewer victims of Camp Fire.
The solution to me is simple: don't buy a house, and if you do, don't make it your only means of savings. I can escape a wildfire, and I think I can escape an earthquake, but my life will not be ruined, as long as I do not own an overpriced home. You are talking about leaders in bed with PG&E or whatever, conspiracies, and right in front of you, you are surrounded, in your community, by people who believe their real estate gives market returns risk free.
Buying off the guy doing research into hexavalent chromium wasn't cheap either. Nor was keeping Willie Brown on their payroll.
I sometimes hangout on /r/homelab, and people are talking about their 600-700W homelab setup. That would cost about 300-350$/month here.
My homelab in the basement is running an old Dell R730. It draws 200-300W depending on load. I could get something much more efficient, but then I would need to run a space heater in that room for most of the year...
1. 56G mellanox switch - 35W
2. An old box I made a router - 50W
3. A two node server - 220W each
Replacing (2) with something that idles at 10W Will probably do one node for (3) so got more ram to try out.
I wish we had cheap energy. I could add much more stuff to this lol.
The thing that kept me away from retired server hardware isn’t so much the power draw as it is the fan noise.
Switch is not too bad, but the 2u (2x 1u nodes in one 2u package with a title or 2x 1u fans) server is a total madness.
So yes, in some ways, it'd be whole lot cheaper, and nostalgic too.
In 2021, for me this was £0.236 per day, today it's £0.60 per day.
It is substantially less than PG&E California prices, which average around 50-55 cents.
Having grown up in rural California I have will return the favor I get for confusing the UK with London ;)
Intelligent Octopus Go is one example - between 23:30 and 05:30 all of your electricity usage is 7p per kWh, for the entire house. For this, you give up controlling when your EV is charged as Octopus either control it through the car, or through a compatible charger. When your car is plugged in, they build a charging schedule when the grid is cheapest and greenest. You give them an "I need to add this % of charge and it to be done by this time tomorrow morning" and it just works it out. On days with a glut of renewable generation (i.e., it's very windy, or very sunny) you will get half hour slots at 7p during the day as well.
Now comes the solar and PV element - their "outgoing octopus" export scheme pays 15p per kWh, so in the summer you can build a nice credit buffer from exported excess energy, and then in the winter, charge the battery whenever the cheap rate is active and given a big "enough" battery, most of your usage will cost you 7p + 5-10% (efficiency losses from AC/DC/AC conversion).
The payback period for Solar + Battery, especially in the UK where we aren't saddled with high tariffs for panels, is coming down markedly. It used to be well in excess of a decade, but is between 5-10 years now.
It’s about 7 years without and 10-12 with here in New Zealand.
I get some installed next month.
PG&E has ~6 million accounts in a state of 40 million people.
Gaming PC Power Consumption: High-end gaming PCs can consume around 300–600 watts while gaming. Let's assume a power usage of 500 watts for simplicity.
Usage Time: Playing continuously for long hours over a quarter (about 90 days) could significantly increase electricity consumption.
500 watts = 0.5 kilowatts Playing 8 hours daily for 90 days = 720 hours 0.5 kW × 720 hours = 360 kWh Electricity Costs: Assuming a cost of £0.30 per kWh:
360 kWh × £0.30 = £108 additional cost. For a £600 increase, you'd need much higher power usage (e.g., using multiple devices like a high-end PC, large TV, and cooling systems) or running the game nearly 24/7. It’s unlikely but feasible if they had an exceptionally inefficient setup or other contributing factors.
| Current prices | New prices (1 January 2023)
Unit rate DY (pence per kWh) | 53.38 | 60.24
Unit rate NT (pence per kWh) | 9.21 | 8.10
edit: attempted formatting.
Type | yearly usage | average annual cost
Low (flat or 1-bedroom house / 1-2 people) | 1,800 kWh | £669.95
Medium (3-bedroom house / 2-3 people) | 2,900 kWh | £943.36
High (5-bedroom house / 4-5 people) | 4,300 kWh | £1,291.34
source: https://www.britishgas.co.uk/energy/guides/average-bill.html
The fairer measurement is probably gas and electric, and your source says ‘ According to Ofgem, the average British household has 2.4 people living in it and uses 2,700 kWh of electricity and 11,500 kWh of gas. This works out at 242 kWh of electricity and 1,000 kWh of gas per month.’
We don’t have gas at home and use about 10,000kW/h here in New Zealand.
Meanwhile, if they only gave a monthly figure, one could wonder if it's an average or if it's taken in January or July.
We heat with a wood burner and so have very flat usage over a year. Heating requirements are lower here in Auckland, New Zealand.
People tend to eat/drink more heated things than during summer (think coffee maker and microwave ovens).
They also tend to spend more time inside due to the weather so they use things needing electricity (TV, computer, radio...).
This is why there has been a big push for offshore wind in the UK, it's an island that has strong winds during winter.
Still since a couple of years ago bills have to be paid according to monthly (sometimes bimonthly) real consumption. I had the feeling this was even a regulatory requirement to make people aware of the real costs and encourage saving. Cannot find a reference to that now. Either I remember it wrong or the search results are just too polluted by marketing pages.
All meters are read remotely with hourly precision. An increasing share of households has spot price contracts. So the price changes every hour. Sometimes negative, sometimes 60 cents/kWh or more to mention the extremes. Switching to 15 minute pricing is on the way already
Of course, heating an entire house with (non-heat-pump) electric heat in a cold climate is kind of crazy. Natural gas is way way cheaper. But I've seen it in old houses here in the Upper Midwest, so it's not _too_ out of the ordinary.
Last time I did the math, even with a 60% efficient furnace natural gas was cheaper than an electric heat pump. PG&E's electric rates are simply that much more expensive than their natural gas rates. Currently that's up to $0.49/kWh on the most popular rate plan vs $2.49/therm. Keep in mind that the fifth and sixth electric rate hikes of 2024 were just approved today by Newsom's regulatory body and don't factor into the price I quoted.
The average for an 80m² apartment is $1100/year.
After the 1970s fuel crises, Denmark invested in district heating and that seems to have paid off.
I'm not an expert so I could've made a mistake somewhere, but my calculations said that the system would have to survive for 10-15 years before it would pull ahead of a new gas boiler.
900 is a small household with limited heating, more like a condo than house.
It is also a fairly well working market in the current system context.
I witnessed this by working for an electricity related startup and by doing all the math involved it was really hard to make the math work out right. The possibility to optimize is there but the margins are really slim, even with the large price swings in the time of use markets in EU.
Can the infrastructure be better? Absolutely, it needs ton of work, but again margins are slim and incentives for large improvements are small.
Do we have a dire need for renewable and moreover dispatchable renewable energy? Absolutely. This means more clean generation and more storage (quite hard).
Does energy feel expensive for households? Yes.
Is it actually expensive?
Could you imagine life without it?
What would it be like?
If you were in this situation, how much would you be willing to pay then?
I don't think this kind of rhetoric helps in any way those who are in "fuel poverty" (which seems to be a UK specific term, as I've never heard that in any other context) and have to choose between food or heating.
Energy is not some magic supernatural thing we're running out of. Given the right equipment it can be created out of thin air (wind and/or solar). The reason UK's energy prices are so high is decades of corruption disguised as mismanagement/incompetence, not that the absolute price of electricity is somehow high.
https://abc30.com/post/california-regulators-approve-pges-5t...
92% of Americans have health insurance. About a third have insurance through the government. Rather than being a scam, most Americans don't understand just how much it costs because of the employer subsidies. At any rate, given the existence of both auto and health insurance, it is hard to go bankrupt from a car accident. Medical bankruptcy gets a lot of attention because it should never happen, not because it is common.
> the tax code is entirely for the wealthy
This makes no sense coming from the UK. The US taxation system is remarkably progressive. Marginal tax brackets, a large standard deduction, and CTC/EITC mean about ~40% of American households pay no federal income tax, or even pay a negative tax (eg., they get paid.) Meanwhile, the UK has the insanely regressive 18% VAT. This would never pass muster in the US because of its regressiveness.
People definitely understand how screwed they are, and being patronizing and trotting out lots of useless stats does nothing for people struggling to get coverage.
I have a HDHP. I think most people would describe that as "health insurance that covers nothing." Most people, however, do not have HDHPs. Medicare and Medicaid have incredible coverage. Most PPO plans have great coverage. As a general rule, US health insurance covers too much, including quackery like chiropractery.
There are definitely edge cases and horrible things that happen and should not, but they are not the norm.
One major thing I do see is people demanding unlimited care of whatever kind they want for no cost. That doesn't exist at all in other countries, which are very restrictive in comparison. In a sensible country, we would not allow millions of people to get on extremely expensive (>1k per dose) off-label diabetes medication to lose weight. This is a fantastic example of spending billions of dollars of insurance premiums on something that for almost all its users is totally superfluous when cheaper and healthier options (but not as convenient) are readily available.
In the US, this happens all the time. The fundamental tension in US healthcare is not that "insurance is too expensive" (it is), "insurance denies claims" (it does), providers are too expensive (they are), the system is too complex (it is.) The fundamental tension is that people want everything, and they want it for nothing. At the end of the day, the only solutions are a) people pay what they can afford or b) you have rationing. Either path has problems. The US currently is trying to have everything for nothing, and the show can only go on for so long. Either people don't get care because they can't afford it, or they don't get care because bureaucrats determined it's not worth it. But they cannot get whatever care they want and can find a doctor to provide, for free.
Isn't it an automatic requirement of the income distribution?
The median not being the mean, and all.
This has been the case for decades. It's not news.
To be fair the UK was completely broke and responsible for feeding half of Europe.
How so? The UK has not been self sufficient for food since before WWII. Hence food rationing for many years after the war ended.
I guess there are some examples of self sabotage, such as Brexit, but no, on the whole people in the UK do not choose to be poor. Like any nation we are at the mercy of the outcomes of the decisions of our politicians and larger global effects that are out of our control.
Also, there are plenty of wealthy people in the UK. You do know that right? The UK is still around 6th in the nominal GDP rankings, so not quite an economic basket case (yet).
The UK has many policies in place that are designed to limit output. These policies are not only not unpopular, they are wildly popular and are basically impossible to change.
Housing is one, infrastructure is another. Like people say we aren't choosing to poor...HS2 is the most expensive rail project ever per mile, double the cost of the outrageously expensive one in California. Why? Because our system gives unlimited power to lawyers, consultants...we were building bat tunnels (literally tunnels for bats) that cost £100m.
And it isn't limited to this. Look at the last Budget: we are in the middle of fiscal collapse. Tens of billions for green energy projects that add to the cost of bills, huge pay rises for the public sector (where productivity is at the same level as 1997), on and on.
How can you not think this stuff is intentional? There is no reason for almost everything we are doing, it makes absolutely no sense but we are being driven off the cliff by politicians, civil servants, lawyers, media/PR, consultants who control this country...to rephrase that: you are saying that there was no reason 11th century Britain couldn't become very rich when it was funnelling all the money to monasteries that were producing nothing but fat monks? The intention of the system isn't to make Britain rich, it is make people inside the system rich...which it is doing (again, HS2 cost £1bn for a railway that didn't get built...where do you think that money goes? there is no railway but there were tens of thousands of consultants...).
Is there some sort of cultural blind-spot?
Or maybe each country has their own ups and downs, and we can accept that even if there is objectively a "better way" to do things, and a country's government can be convinced to try this better way, it stil has to bring the people along with it, and those millions of people all have all kinds of hangups and incentives that get in the way; politics are hard.
With regard to post-war food rationing, much of it was due to crop failure or stockpiles being ruined by terrible weather, and obviously the rest of Europe was ravaged and destroyed. But it was also political. Labour liked rationing and the Tories didn't, and the Tories stoked public anger at it. Clearly the UK citizens didn't like it, it was the main fight of the 1950 general election.... which Labour narrowly won. Then Labour called a snap election in 1951, won a record high voteshare, but narrowly lost to the Tories.
If you're genuinuely interested in the topic, Wikipedia has an informative timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...
Can't wait for people to moan about it on LBC.
Yes, but it's not specifically British: most nations (and many companies) I've looked at in any depth seem to have this blind spot — "not invented here" is one of several kinds of in-group favoritism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
Also see this with diets, religious and political affiliations, and back in the day used to see it with Mac vs. PC.
the average UK consumer consumes 1/3 of the power consumed by a US consumer.
which makes the average UK energy consumption is equivalent to one of a low-middle income country.
energy consumption is heavily tied to prosperity.
AC is barely even desirable here. It occasionally reaches a whopping 30. We don't have AC at home because it's a silly frippery in a brick house at 54°N in Europe.
We certainly need heating, but not like in saskatchewan.
The new one removed the ban on building wind turbines on land within 48 hours of taking power, and are pushing through new transmission lines where they were previously blocked.
We don't even get that much sun in summer, today sunrise was at 0842, sunset at 1540 - so not even 7 hrs of daylight. Even then it was a very dull day.
So in the period (winter) when we most need power, local solar is essentially useless.
Local wind may be better, but the economics for it don't really work - requiring 100% gas turbine backup, and high costs due to intermittent use of said turbines .
In summer, I can easily get over 20kWh per day - against a daily usage of 10kWh. I release all of my data at https://gitlab.com/edent/solar-data/
Today, in the dead of winter, I got 2.8kWh - https://bsky.app/profile/solar.bots.edent.tel/post/3ldqqrvkw... - a not insignificant amount. My battery charged overnight, so I only drew about 4kWh from the grid during the day.
You can read all about how well solar works in the UK on my blog https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar/
You are in large part confirming what GP is saying, no?
The 100% annually is of limited use when it's so skewed. Sure having local batteries are a good thing but also costly.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/20/unite-union...
"Supplier costs and margins" probably should take a fair bit of the blame too.
When Thatcher privatised the UK energy industry to make it "competitive", they basically created an entire complex web of middlemen. The systems they use to communicate is enormously complicated, still kind of stuck in the 90s (think CSV over FTP), and would be basically unnecessary if it were just one company.
Ok in fairness electricity makes more sense to privatise than water or railways - at least you can choose where to buy your electricity from, within reason.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/29/gas-fired-p...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/31/uk-electric...
https://www.current-news.co.uk/ofgem-fines-intergen-37m-for-...
Also, electricity isn't any less of a monopoly. You can choose your supplier, but they do no more than administer your metering and billing (including the government insisting they install smart meters). Your house is still connected to the same domestic grid as everybody else, and it's National Grid plc that is selecting who's generating and when, and getting paid for it.
The ones that were detected were fined, we don't know how much of that goes on but more subtly.
National Grid plc has minute-by-minute graphs. It can see you taking the piss, and its friends in Ofgem are on speed-dial.
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2023-08/Final%2...
All the BBG article proved is the inherent problems with the system that we have. Rather than anyone being blamed for creating that system, rather than anyone being blamed for regulating that system, we get the same politically-motivated nonsense about "evil companies"...this is why we have high electricity costs. There is literally zero political incentive to lower them and, as we have seen, very high political gains from proposing fictional solutions. Guess what? We are still going to be in the exact same place in a few years because we haven't changed the thing causing this (over-reliance on renewables).
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/19/thames-wate...
They did try with the railway network (Railtrack) which was subsequently renationalised and only the train operating companies being private (and even they, like electricity generating companies, are often state-owned by other countries...).
Handing an entire national network monopoly to a single company is foolish.
Out of the £1700 average annual bill, supplier profits are £43...this is significantly higher than has been the case normally because of the volatility in energy prices. This return is also controlled by the regulator.
For scale, the cost of government subsidies is £183.
Predictably the first thing the incoming government did was: announce massive new subsidies, and create a state-owned energy company.
Network costs have also gone up because of the well-known problems with performing work on any kind of infrastructure in the UK.
The politics are part of the reason why costs are so high. We constantly rotate through insane policies that relate to the fever dreams of a lawyer. The reason why prices are high is because we have policies in place to increase prices. Companies are not making big profits (again, their returns are controlled by the regulators). Look at share prices, collapsing in the sector (unless they are getting government money).
The issue with suppliers is they are spending a ton of money dealing with complexity that shouldn't exist, so even though they aren't making a profit they're costing you unnecessarily.
The people who are making a profit are DNOs. Totally different thing.
Smart meters for example, though rollout has hit snags and they've become targets for weird conspiracy theories, they are basically designed to give better real time info on electricity demand which helps with managing the grid.
This in theory should save money elsewhere.
Similarly for CfD. Yes the government may on net be paying a subsidy to get wind power built but what was the next best option? If that costs more than the CfD then that's a win.
£88 to £143 installation cost in the 2019 analysis. [3:p.21] Smart meter hardware cost £36 to £120 [3:p.22]
£67 to £107 installation cost in the 2016 analysis. [2:p.12] £15 (in home display) + £44 electric + £57 gas + £29 comms equipment costs [2:p.10]
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7f59f9ed915...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7f2f8b40f0b...
[3] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5d7f54c4e5274...
Not sure how many years the cost is assumed to be spread over and what the ongoing running costs are but that's the per average customer cost apparently.
If you've been on a meter that reads low for a long time, a new meter (mechanical or electronic) will be a big jump.
Any half decent programmer on HN knows what to do when something has almost no chance of happening.
Some of these things display only billable KWH while it isn't so expensive to display current consumption too.
You can also measure it twice so that one can (remotely) see two entirely different readings and replace the meter with one that works properly. It could also display the amount of money owed. (estimate) It would make it slightly more expensive for everyone rather than accidentally billing some people truly crazy amounts.
Just like a bank account can have a configurable limit for withdrawals the smart thing to do is to set a limit per day, week, month and have an alarm go off and/or shut everything down.
Say my monthly bill is 200, I don't want the previous 7 days to exceed 500.
Just a flashing led and a 5000 euro bill isn't smart. Imagine diagnosing a server by how fast the led flashes. Imagine replacing the speedometer in your car with a flashing light. You will know how fast you drove when the fines come in.
Intelligent Octopus Go being one example.
This let's me know when electricity is in less demand or high supply and schedule my day around it. Making my electricity bill cheaper and likewise putting less strain on the supplier which reduces their costs too
Paired with a home battery it can be pretty effective, but I don't have one and instead I just work around it and use my electrical heating more when it's cheaper and rely on my insulation to last throughout when it gets more expensive during the day. I've also started cooking dinner later to get past the evening hump.
I'm currently paying wholesale + 0.49 c/kWh margin for my electricity and I'm averaging out to 6.67 c/kWh (incl. margin) in December. Wholesale average has been about 6.61 c/kWh. Add transfer and tax on top of that and it's around 0.13 €/kWh total.
I live in an apartment so the two big electricity-wasters are the dishwasher and the washing machine. Delaying doing the laundry by a couple of days or running the dishwasher half a day later keeps the average much lower. And if you have an EV, just charge it during the night when wholesale prices get closer to 0€.
Your EV can modulate its charging very quickly, and "background" loads like electric heating, water heater or even A/C can also be modulated somewhat quickly (though not as quick as an EV's inverter).
The meter needs however to make sure you indeed complied with the demand in order to pay you fairly (otherwise if people can defect on their obligation and still get paid, it defeats the purpose of the scheme of ensuring grid stability).
Doing this at the substation is not granular enough because then you can no longer determine who contributed what and whom to pay, which then removes any incentive for people actually participate.
In theory, this should lead to significant savings and efficiency benefits, as everyone opted into the scheme can now be used as an on-demand load to dump excess power (during which power is not only free, but the consumer may even be paid to consume that power) to smooth out supply/demand fluctuations.
Of course, the UK's smart meter scheme is administered by Capita, so don't expect any of this to actually happen, work reliably or actually lead to any kind of significant benefits, but in theory, it would be a great thing as long as it's done by competent people without corruption/mismatched incentives.
What I describe would be real-time with seconds-level granularity and operated by the grid operator as part of the distribution network and thus provider-agnostic. The idea is to (financially) incentivize people to shift their demand and production around grid fluctuations in real-time - this should allow everyone to get "more" out of the grid by better coordinating supply and production and respond to unexpected events.
If the grid is not stable then it needs upgrades. Automated austerity to cover a backlog of undone work is madness.
It's massively wasteful if they are all going to need replacing again in 10 years when 4g is switched off.
Not to mention the concerns about electricity companies remotely forcing meters into prepayment mode or switching off people's electricity supply.
3G is being discontinued first because it uses more power and is inefficient for data. 2G on the other hand uses less power, allows phones without VoLTE support to make calls, and IoT devices to use (slow) data. Over the next year or so we should see networks restricting data over 2G/EDGE for regular devices (calls only), keeping the data side just for IoT.
Direct investment with ownership - that would make money for the tax payer but would be "socialism".
In 2021, it was 22p/kWh and in 2022, it went to 44p/kWh.
It's come down 6-7p each year since but doubling in one year is crazy.
Native english speaker, but definitely not a grammarian, so I can't explain why...
WHERE???? Nobody gets their electricity this way at any reasonable scale.
The only thing which makes this prospect expensive, is the lack of political will to make it not expensive. So find the political will.
See: https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2024/may/24/...
If you look at China they design one nuke station and just copy and paste it to reduce costs, since parts can be mass produced.
The reason we are in this position is because we looked at building nuclear in the mid-2010s, the cost would have been about half current prices, we didn't build because they were too expensive.
Nothing has been more costly than not investing in capacity.
Yes, the Australian GenCost report is about generation costs (no mention of transmission or storage in that graphic, for instance).
The https://www.electricitybills.uk breakdown shows that the cost to the consumer consists of far more than just the cost of generating electricity. Intermittents generally connect to the distribution network (given their smaller output). Intermittents necessitate transmission upgrades because wind farms are in a different location to people and require overbuilding of capacity. Intermittents require more balancing because a passing cloud or lull in the wind affects their output. Intermittents require capacity payments for the backup (methane) generators that have to keep on standby.
Plus let us not forget that the intermittent generators get revenue from RO, CfD, and FIT.
Also, I don't want another Chernobyl next to me house, so those reactors had better be properly made, therefore expensive.
A 'spent' fuel rod has yielded something like 0.5% of its atomic potential. Complete burns are feasible. So from the fuel rods alone, we can generate 19_500% as much electricity as all nuclear plants since they came into existence have ever generated.
Earth will never run out of fissionables at any rate of use which is reasonable to contemplate. It's just a thing that you need to believe despite that it isn't true. You've chained together a loose collection of political slogans with no grounding in reality or truth.
A big difference though is that UK (and US) submarine reactors use enriched uranium, SMRs won't.
I addressed that difference in my second sentence. The technological competence is to a large degree transferable, the specific designs are not.
And yes, something like the SMR is exactly what I'm talking about, as long as it comes with enough commitment and momentum to actually do the job.
Here's the latest: electric instant water heaters designed as drop-in replacements for gas boilers in hydronic heating systems: https://stromltd.com
All the inconveniences of a hydronic system and resistive electric in a single solution, what's not to like?
This is the perfect "slumlord special", installed in place of more economical (and ecological) solutions such as A/C knowing full well the tenant is going to pay the resulting astronomical bills.
AFAIK resistive electrical heating is banned in Denmark, except in buildings for only occasional use (summer house etc).
If someone wanted, they could drive up to my house and see the colour of my door. The fact that someone has always been able to create a database of front door colours isn't inherently a data leak.
A UUID and electricity usage for the past half hour for a house in the general vicinity isn't useful. Even if you could put a name to that UUID, I struggle to think of how that would be a major issue. Especially considering with a thermal camera, and assuming construction details from the age and type of the house, you could already estimate your neighbours energy usage anyway.
Remote shutoff on the other hand....
In America, yes. Here the meter->gateway is encrypted zigbee, the gateway is over 3/4g.
However the remote contactor is more of an issue. You can be turned off remotely without much ceremony.
In the UK only "central" England and south transmits data over the mobile network. In northern England and Scotland, the data is transmitted over UHF radio.
The downside is that the non cellular backhaul is provided by arquiva, who are shits.
Also to enable "surge pricing" such that folks ration of disconnect themselves, rather than pay the surge price.
Other than that, they don't really have a benefit for the user, the details one variable use could simply be monitored by manual reading on a weekly basis.
I don't mind smart meters; it's nice getting the metrics and data from them.
I do avoid variable rate billing though.
And Intelligent Octopus Go is a variable rate - 7p 23:30-05:30 (and any time during the day your EV is plugged in and there's a glut of green cheap energy on the grid).
Eg. An electric car that can do V2G with the following;
Power to the grid when Rate > Y and carCharge > 50%
Charge the car when Rate < X.
There's various posts on electric car groups where people have the above setup and pull in ridiculous profits. Your typical electric car can output power for a very long time during the ridiculous 10000% price hikes and on the flipside when the price occasionally hits ~0 charging is basically free.
If you have some system of power storage variable rate can make you money.
https://thedriven.io/2024/02/27/australian-evs-could-earn-12...
Hopefully you noticed that spike in prices ahead of time!
Essentially the downside you mention is worse on the fixed rate: On fixed rate you'll have no power at all - the fixed rate providers will cut power completely to protect themselves financially if the grid is in a prolonged period of extreme price (they did this in Texas). On a variable rate you can choose to cut yourself off or not.
That is not what happened in Texas. The REPs had zero say to do a rolling brownout. "Rolling" outages which became semi-permanent outages were done by the delivery companies, not the retail providers. Retail providers can't just choose to stop selling me electricity for a few hours because they think it's too unprofitable for them, that's not allowed in the contract. My REP at the time probably had some massive costs due to customers like me which didn't lose power; they folded and sold the contract to another company.
> On a variable rate you can choose to cut yourself off or not.
Once again, you clearly don't know what actually happened in Texas. Several people I know on variable rate plans lost power for days.
But hey keep speaking falsehoods instead of actually learning what happened.
(A similar thing happened in the UK: there weren't any brown-outs, but the spike in wholesale energy prices sent a lot of smaller retail energy companies under. If you were with one of them, like I was, you had no interruption to your supply and in fact won out compared to those on variable tarrifs: the losers were the investors in the retail companies and those who they were unable to pay).
I will agree in general though: unless you have particularly unusual energy consumption habits, or think that the energy market will go up more than the retail companies thing they will, you'll probably win out on a variable rate contract over time, especially if you have a battery to time-shift your consumption (And with the most common UK provider for this, there is still a cap on how much you'll pay, even if wholesale prices skyrocket like they did in Texas).
I'm not in the UK, but I gather my utility can do a radio controlled disconnect (they may need to come onsite to reconnect). I would hope that wouldn't be used to enable a virtual brown out for customers of a particular energy marketplace, but I think it's a capability of many communicating meters.
Not where I live - Sweden - since there is a fixed energy tax raised on electricity. We buy electricity on the artificial 'Nord Pool' market at market rates + 2.5 öre (1 öre is 1/100 Swedish krona, at current exchange rates 1 öre is about equal to $0.009) surcharge which means that the actual electricity costs are 0 when the market rate is at -0.025 SEK/kWh. Such a 'free' kWh costs us around 0.88 SEK due to:
- 0.4280 SEK energy tax
- + 25% 'value-added tax' on top of that tax (yes, tax on tax is a thing here) makes this 0.5350 SEK/kWh
- 0.34 SEK//kWh 'transport charge' (this includes 25% value-added tax)
All this means the market rate per kWh has to fall below 0.905 SEK/kWh for electricity to actually be 'free'. This has happened but fortunately this is a rarity. Fortunately? Yes, of course. This basically only happens when there is a large discrepancy between electricity production and electricity demand/transport capacity which in turn lead to excessive voltage and frequency in the distribution network which in turn can lead to the network going off-line.
It hit £1 a couple of weeks ago. Ouch
It's cheap if you use the majority of your energy in the wee hours right?
over the last three months, I've been paying on average 16p a unit. Thats with a car as well. On the days in the winter when solar isn't doing shit, we top up at the lowest price that day.
This kinda goes to the articles point which is to you can avoid, or limit the peak with local storage.
The issue with the battery is that its costs a shit tonne. a basic battery is going to cost something like £8k installed.
Its almost certainly cheaper to upgrade the grid compared to adding batteries to a million households. Especially as the lifespan of batteries isn't that long compared to the super grid.
Proper solution is to pool them in a dedicated buildings so you still get the benefit of locality at the neighborhood level while containing the consequences of a failure and limiting them to property damage (vs potential loss of life), but that would use up land that can otherwise be used as a way to (literally) seek rent, so it cannot happen.
yes, although they are statistically much safer than fridges, or combined washer driers. (unless you include cheap e-bikes or hoverboards...)
I don't have mine inside the house, its very much outside with a wooden lintel supporting a surprisingly sandy flower trough.
I also have micro inverters, because they are more efficient, and less fucking noisy. They are also, as you hint at, much safer. Partly because they are not switching ~400v DC but also because they don't need to handle as much power.
If I didn't have a smart meter my levellised cost of energy wouldn't be negative like it is now (EV tariff + Solar + Battery).