Aren't higher energy prices exactly what we need to combat climate change though?
The UK has a lot of wind (shallow waters, strong wind blasts from Atlantic etc) and wind is significantly cheaper, but because there's gas still on the grid everyone pays the higher gas based price even if energy is mostly coming from cheaper wind.
Yes, the renewable cleaner energy is actually cheaper than the fossil fuel it's replacing and in a perfect world should reduce bills.
All markets (not just energy markets) work in this way.
You're describing how a market functions. If the gas plants went offline tomorrow, could the wind turbines produce sufficient energy to power the national grid?
In practice UK electricity prices _are_ much cheaper from wind and solar energy, most of the time, because virtually all of that capacity in the UK was built under what is known as a CFD (contracts for difference) basis. The exact mechanism is a bit subtle [1], but in essence renewables built that way have a fixed price per unit of energy (usually for 20 years after construction). This price is less than what the gas energy producers typically bid in the UK.
The reasons why electricity prices are still on average very high in the UK is because the rest of the energy market is _so_ exposed to gas prices and renewables can't produce electricity a lot of the time (because it's not always windy, and it's not always light outside). Renewable production is highly correlated with itself and not necessarily aligned with demand.
The UK also has other structural problems in the electricity system that have arisen from its exposure to renewables that come with associated costs. For example wind turbines in Scotland often get paid to _turn off_ because their power can't be transmitted to the south of England where it can be used - there are similar constraints with North sea production. Wind turbines and solar panels replacing traditional coal power stations means that the electricity grid has lost a lot of its traditional load balancing and stability mechanisms (conventional power plants provide a lot of stability because large rotational mass synchronised to the grid frequency provides inertia in the entire grid - wind turbine rotation is independent of the grid frequency). ESO now has to have more drastic and expensive mechanisms like demand reduction and rapid response hot reserves in-place. A lot of these issues are transient and will get cheaper over time, but they've become acute in the short-term with the UK's rapid grid decarbonisation.
[1] they get paid directly from the day-ahead, spot, and other markets at the last bidder price. But they either have to refund any amount over their fixed price, or they receive a top-up from the energy companies so that they effectively got the fixed price.
Combine that with high costs of housing (both to purchase but also to rent) and people are, generally speaking, fucked and living paycheck to paycheck. Renters especially live a precarious life where prices regularly go up 10% per year and you might be legally told to leave with not much more than a month's notice leading to much upheaval and associated costs.
No.
What you need to combat climate change is cheap green energy, and "green" is just a different question entirely to "cost".
If you have expensive energy, regardless of how green it is or isn't, you get poverty.
If you have greenhouse-gas-emitting energy, regardless of how cheap or expensive it is, you get climate change.
20 years ago, all the green energy was expensive; now, green energy is the cheapest around.
great to notice, but the overview falls short.. price signals are supposed to trigger conservation yet somehow, that is not discussed. Also note that energy markets have lifecycles.. it takes investment and infrastructure to make and deliver energy. Fossil fuels have done that in the past.
Energy conservation has been discussed my entire life.
When I was a kid, it was things like double glazing, close windows, wear pullovers indoors, turn off lights when you leave a room, CFLs.
Late teen to young adult, increased loft insulation, cavity wall insulation. Energy efficiency standards for consumer goods. Cars getting taxed based on emissions.
More recently, a campaign group literally called "Insulate Britain": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulate_Britain_protests
> Fossil fuels have one that in the past
At first, but the last coal plant has been closed, and renewables are ascendent — just past midnight UK time and still 28.5% renewables, average for last week 33.6%, and for last year 36.8%: https://grid.iamkate.com/
Then, to make killing this political suicide, make sure to mail every man, woman, and dog a check every two weeks called 'CARBON DIVIDEND'.
We effectively did this in Canada and it still became a political albatross.
(Though in practice the cheque was done via direct deposit and a lot of people didn't realize where the money was coming from despite it being clearly labelled. I think cheques in the mail would have been more effective.)
Currently if users as a group demand more power than clean can provide, dirty gets turned on and everyone pays the highest cost.
We need a way for a consumer to be able to commit to only clean power, potentially at a lower cost but with limited supply.
It means there is no way for an individual consumers behaviour to drive (or be driven by) the green energy proportion, as if the collective demand is too high then you pay the market rate for coal anyway.
Though even without that, solar, wind, and batteries are already cheaper.
When a polluting industry poisons the air and the water and people go to the hospital because they are coughing or they have dysentery, who will pay to cleanup the mess? If you frame the discussion as about “price” it is a non-starter.
I would argue it is better to talk about workers and their families. As in let us not shit in the river so our children don’t get sick and can go to school. Let us not poison the air so workers can do their jobs and not go to hospital.
1. You're welcome to argue that, but you haven't here. You've just stated it.
2. You shouldn't supplant one topic with another. High energy prices kill people, because energy drives the cost of everything, and people can direct less value into things that keep them healthy if they're spending a greater proportion of their income on survival. You can say "also air should be clean", fine, but not "Don't think about prices! Look over here instead!"
2. You can have your cake and eat it, if you drop the requirement to buy electricity at the price of the most expensive component in the mix. Spain did just that and they're currently experiencing an industrial revival thanks to comparatively low energy prices.
Adding a separate topic seems like a distraction. Everyone knows about negative externalities. I don't think we need to rehearse the same points to obscure the specific one I'm asking about.
They're trying to explain in good faith as far as I can tell.
Indeed, and so does air pollution. Having (accurate) prices on both allows the market to reduce pollution and energy costs efficiently.
Put another way, in a world where fossil fuels are no longer consumed, there isn't any reason to limit energy consumption for its sake, since the whole point was to encourage adoption of cleaner technologies. There is a case to be made that this isn't true, since even the "clean" technologies have an environmental impact, but that is tangential to the discussion.
We are basically stuck until even those guys realise that coal is a loser just for practical, non carbon priced reasons.
Can you explain exactly what you mean? Say (very made up numbers) coal is $1 per day, and a renewable is $2 per day. I raise the price of coal to $3 per day to make it relatively more expensive. Haven't I just increased the price of energy overall to $2 per day?
This reminds me of that popular "reality" show where they remodel a family's home and surprise them with what is basically a palace. Afterward the families are shattered by energy costs, and eventually exorbitant property taxes. Off camera they are forced into forclosure and end up in debt.
After the first month or so they are forced to seal off most of the house as they desperately try to stay afloat. Lacking financial savvy, most end up mortgaging the home.
The wealthiest people will end up paying more than they receive back, while the poorest will receive a boost. All while incentivizing low carbon alternatives in every sector of the economy.
But unfortunately, even the most liberal political groups have walked back any interest in solving climate change at the margin. You see this with the endless life of the "100 companies cause climate change" misinformation.
Without that, the argument is basically "We know that life is barely worth living, but we aren't going to help with that. Instead we want to make your life even worse to save the environment!"
Good news, the UK has completely moved away from coal: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-e...
China is now consuming record amounts of coal (the globe has not actually even reached peak-coal yet despite claims we'd already passed it going back decades and despite western coal consumption taking a nosedive starting about 20 years ago). Which is strange considering that it has also been an enormous producer and exporter of allegedly much cheaper solar and wind generators for many years.
Something doesn't add up here, and further disadvantaging much cleaner domestic industry and driving production offshore to countries with far higher emissions intensity of production (not to mention many other environmental and humanitraian issues) is not the way to solve climate change. It could be making it even worse.