Time to decouple the UK Electricity price from Gas so we can actually reap the benefits of this as a consumer.
We work in half hours, 48 of them per day. If you're a very large user (e.g maybe you're a factory which makes cars), or if you choose to do this at home, you can be metered in half hours and billed this way.
In advance of the half hour, we guess how much power we might need. 9pm here soon, I reckon 30GW per the British mainland. Now we run an auction. Everybody who can make power from 9pm to 9:30 bids, saying how much they'd accept to make power
Then, starting from the lowest bids, we add bidders up to 30GW of power, those people will make our 30GW of electricity, and we pay all of them the same price, that price is last bid needed to meet our 30GW goal.
This is often a closed cycle gas turbine because:
1. There are fucking shitloads of them. Probably 35GW nameplate, maybe 40GW, that is a lot of power generation. More than any other single type (Wind can deliver about 20GW to the grid, solar is smaller, nuclear is much smaller, storage also smaller even if you count it as generation which it technically is not)
2. They are (almost, maintenance is necessary) always willing to run, for a price. Rain or shine, night or day, if there is gas at any price they can charge that price plus a little profit to make it into electricity. Only question is if you'll pay
For a typical home tariff the "supplier" you're paying has guessed that on average they'll make a healthy profit if they charge you say 24p per kWh plus standing.
They pay that half-hourly price, if they guessed badly wrong and can't cover the difference they go bankrupt, which sucks for the government who are on the hook to ensure you still get electricity anyway.
So, the de-coupling would happen automatically if the current system stayed the same but you added a lot of cheap storage and enough wind power that on average the country was mostly wind powered. Or indeed nukes or solar if somehow this country built loads of nuke stations or got improbably sunnier.
The UK was just extra stupid by banning nearly all construction of onshore wind.
Is there some other plans you support?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/20/why-the-uks...
> "If we actually paid the average price of what our electricity now costs to produce, our bills would be substantially cheaper."
> In simple terms: the price in the electricity market on any given day is dictated by the most expensive source of generation available, which in the UK would be its gas-fired power plants.
I support "roll out more renewables faster" and pricing reform. Linked article makes it clear that the UK has "one of the most expensive electricity markets in the world" and this impacts consumers and businesses.
Which does raise the question: who benefits from the current pricing arrangement, and why do they have the deciding vote?
You could change that, but it would just mean prices will be higher at another moment (in a perfect market), no?
The UK is an outlier as noted above. So no, this is not "simply how things work" in general. It's unusual.
> it would just mean prices will be higher at another moment, no?
No, see first quoted piece of text above.
My assumption also is that it's a far from perfect market - see last paragraph.
And "Britain paying highest electricity prices in the world"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/26/britain-burd..."
And "Why are Britain’s power prices the highest in the world?"
https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q4-2024/why-are-brita...
And "UK energy bills highest in Europe and public patience is wearing thin"
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-energy-bills-highest-in-europe...
"highest" means an outlier, doesn't it?
From your electricinsights article:
> Most markets work in this way: Saudi Arabia’s oil is cheap to produce but gets a very similar price to higher-cost oil from the North Sea. The underlying economic principle is so widespread that it’s known as the Law of One Price.
But I still think there's something very British in insisting "Why, it's all above board, we play by the same rules as everyone else of course. We just get a worse outcome than anyone else because, well ... um ... look over there! Immigrants!!" (I'm not paraphrasing you, rather the country as a whole)
British exceptionalism at its finest.
Real Trump-level stupid and like Trump, the media seems to be actively diverting attention from it.
That and not installing insulation or mandating new homes to be better built cost the country billions and it got more costly when gas prices spiked.
The current govenrment can't shift costs from clean electricity to dirty gas, or to general taxation, because the media would crucify them. Meanwhile Farage is campaigning on getting rid of net zero and the NHS and they love him.
The same media starting a culture war about heat pumps at the moment. Basically if you assume the media and the political right are owned by gas and oil interests, the politics since North Sea discoveries make a lot more sense. It's like they were trying to burn as much of it as inefficiently as possible rather than use it wisely for its owners, the people.
I am not sure how people still don't realise this after ten years of doing this and energy prices going up non-stop.
Complaining about transition costs, to me, is like complaining that industrial waste disposal was cheaper back when we just dumped everything into the next river.
This is still done. Thames Water.
It’s relatively easy to turn off gas when renewables are supplying energy to the grid at near zero cost marginal cost. But also easy to turn on gas when the renewables aren’t supplying energy, or when demand spikes in a manner uncorrelated to renewable generation.
Batteries are a more elegant solution long term, of course.
Batteries work well for short term day-to-day storage but they're impossibly expensive for seasonal storage which we will need a solution for for the last ~5-10% of decarbonization.
Probably the only way to fully decarbonize will eventually be to synthesize gas.
Day ahead pricing: https://agileprices.co.uk/ National grid supply/demand and energy mix: https://grid.iamkate.com/
>The UK’s electricity market operates using a system known as “marginal pricing”. This means that all of the power plants running in each half-hour period are paid the same price, set by the final generator that has to switch on to meet demand, which is known as the “marginal” unit.
i.e. if you have 99 units of solar but have 100 demand, 1 unit of gas plant fires up to fill it then all 100 units are compensated at the gas rate even if the wind was cheap.
Gas is a really appealing backup option for both renewable and nuclear powered grids (at least in the absence of freely available hydropower).
But as installed power/capacity grows and batteries get cheaper, reliance on gas will hopefully decrease (and supply might get bolstered by renewable-powered synthgas within the next decades).