Cool so when will this translate into cheaper energy? Why am I paying $0.4 per kwh?
They'll also likely reduce the balancing costs by relieving congestion.
Probably too small to notice among all the other costs and changes, like deploying more renewables and starting to pay in advance for new nuclear.
In the UK I believe it is policy for electricity prices to be high in general for thse reasons and to encourage lower usage.
The issue in the UK is that we moved to renewables that can't produce energy at the margin, marginal prices are still driven by gas, and we simultaneously decided to shut down large amounts of non-renewable sources of energy to satisfy the ambitions of politicians.
Result? Highest energy prices in the world, most energy-intensive industry shutting down, and massive reliance on political direction/regulators by industry (the original comment is not right, since the mid-2010s energy companies have been directed day-to-day by the state, invest in this project, don't do this anymore, etc. Our policy is made by people who wish the world was a certain way, reality doesn't matter to them).
It's the same as they are doing on immigration: They say they want to lower it but the actual policy is to keep it high. People have understood that now, which explains in big part the Conservative wipe out. Labour is now on the same path.
Retail electricity is taxed in the UK.
Even if they're typically the same, because CCGT is the best for on-demand generation, flattening the demand curve ought to slightly reduce that marginal cost.
I've seen the UK generation market attacked quite a lot lately, but to me it makes sense to price everything at the marginal cost, and doing so also helps encourage capital investment in generation that can have lower generation costs themselves, because the marginal cost is only slowly impacted rather than a boom and bust model.
Fixed costs and capital costs end up being shouldered by the consumer which ironically ends up pushing overall costs up.
In Australia prices were reduced by over $50 a year per person in the state on average once a similar battery went online. Similar policies and market there to this case too. Details: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
I get that it's easy to be pessimistic but batteries like the above not only pay themselves off in 2years (From the article above, $46million profit in one year alone on a $90million install cost!) they also cut prices on the grid from day one.
Behind the scenes prices can fluctuate between <0 and >100x baseline. These types of installations immediately smooth out the costs. As long as you have competing wholesalers/providers the price reductions will come through pretty quickly based on similar cases.
I guess what we can't do is step into the alternative world where there's less batteries and renewables, and complain about paying $0.6 per kwh.
The lowest mine goes is $0.3 1am-4am.
Agile prices can spike up to 100 p/kWh any time - although a typical household in Winter '22-'23 paid around 35 p/kWh average.
so that's even more than I'm paying. This seems to only make sense if you have some sort of intelligent battery system.
It's great! I assume I'll get hit by a price spike at some point, hasn't happened for a couple of years so far.
Average unit cost for me yesterday was 4.35p/kWh.
I'm happy to shoulder a very 40p peaks every so often as it's very often cheaper overall.
In terms of countries, it's closer to France, or Belgium, or the Netherlands than to Scotland.
It is in the UK though, so, if your model of where "Scotland" is just means vaguely "the United Kingdom somewhere" and thus also includes London then yeah, close enough.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bjorn-lomborg-solar-wind-p...
https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/more-misinforma...
As far as I can see pricing electricity on the marginal costs of gas has not been a good strategy. I think we should be charged the true cost of generation which is something like 8 times lower for renewables.
I assume there's a mark up in there even if I didn't say it.
My point is that base cost of gas is so much higher than renewable energy that we are crippling our economy by forcing the renewable engergy market rate to be based on the market price of gas.
What we have is a single electricity market because electricity consumers do not care how this electricity was made. Their motors spin, their lamps light, it's the same whether we burned peat (which is very, very bad for the environment) or strung together a lot of photovoltaics and made the sun's light into electricity directly.
Just look at all the unnamed points in the lower left that are actually creating the trend he claims to have found.
If you graph developed nations the correlation reverses.
If gas costs £1 a unit and solar is 90p, solar is profitable (especially if you get paid the gas price). If gas is 50p a unit, solar isn't going to be much of an investment.