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Comment by cbeach | Hacker News Reader

This is poor reporting by Elektrek. The article compares wind and gas costs but completely fails to explain:

* the gas price in the article includes the government’s self-imposed carbon tax. The actual cost of gas (£55) is FAR lower than the £91.20 strike price Milibad has set for wind. And Miliband has locked in this terrible pricing for 20 years!

* there are huge extra costs for wind power that are not accounted for in this quoted strike price. The grid must be upgraded. Expensive new power generation capability will need to be built to compensate for the intermittency of wind

* the stated power capacity of wind generation is a theoretical maximum, and the actual capacity will be much lower in practice.

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> The actual cost of gas

The actual cost has to price in the impact of using it.

For example, it's cheaper for UK water companies to pump sewage into rivers and onto beaches:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9kz8ydjpno

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-67357566

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yprnd848ko

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/16/sewage-o...

But maybe it's a nice idea to force them to deal with sewage properly so you don't have to live in rivers of shit.

The "actual cost" is a loaded term and probably cannot be known without putting reasonable bounds on it.

Nonetheless, two thoughts come to mind:

1) we don't know the "actual cost" of offshore wind

2) we may not be able to afford even the "market cost" of offshore wind without the natgas tax subsidy

> The actual cost has to price in the impact of using it.

Is there real evidence the collected tax revenue is actually offsetting carbon emissions?

There's a lot of fraud in carbon credit systems - where often the sole benefit is feeling and/or looking good.

Is this self-imposed tax actually having a real result - or is it just artificially increasing the price of energy? If the latter, then it's not really fair to claim it's the actual cost.

Carbon tax is not about offsetting emissions, it's about disincentivising fossil fuels.

It is about disincentivizing fossil fuels because there are negative externalities which are not priced-in absent the carbon tax.

.. you are commenting on an article about how non-carbon-emitting energy options are beating out polluting alternatives, aided by exactly these taxes, so obviously yes, they are working exactly as intended: price signals for the market to get carbon out of the energy system

The purpose of the tax is not to raise money to plant trees, it’s to raise the cost of emissions so that markets move away from them

TFA's claim is offshore wind prices are 40% cheaper than gas.

The parent comment stated "actual cost has to price in the impact of using it". Most people would agree on this. However, for both claims to be true, the collected tax revenue must be spent offsetting the impact of that gas usage - not simply reducing gas usage (ie. that consumed gas isn't being compensated for).

If the UK government is spending that tax revenue on anything it wants, then it's not the actual cost, is it?

Sorry I don’t follow. Why would the taxes need to be spent offsetting anything? The carbon reduction already happened, because the taxes made this auction choose lower emission alternatives.

If you then also spend the taxes on some form of offsets (if we pretend for the sake of argument that those work) you would have reduced emissions twice. One time seems plenty to say they are doing their job.

>* the gas price in the article includes the government’s self-imposed carbon tax. The actual cost of gas (£55) is FAR lower than the £91.20 strike price Milibad has set for wind.

Is that unreasonable? Carbon dioxide is an externality, and it needs to be accounted for accordingly. Suppose the government is tendering contracts for milk for school lunches. One farm runs a CAFO[1] that pollutes the local river. The other has cows on a pasture that doesn't. Is it that unreasonable for the government to be like "well hang on, the CAFO farm might be cheaper the grass fed farm, but it'll cost us money to clean up all the shit they're dumping into the river, so we're going to impose a tax on the CAFO farm for their pollution"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_animal_feeding_op...

Yes, it is completely reasonable if you understand the concept of externalities.

People motivated exclusively by personal profit are systematically disincentivized from understanding the concept of externalities.

> Is that unreasonable? Carbon dioxide is an externality, and it needs to be accounted for accordingly.

Yes it is unreasonable. Spending money to reduce carbon is just a subsidy for other countries who DGAF and will emit both theirs and yours.

When your country emits more CO2 there’s more CO2 in the atmosphere independent of what anyone else does.

So it’s true each individual country only receives a fraction of the negative impact of their own emissions, but that fraction isn’t zero and therefore should be taxed to maximize economic efficiency. Further joining international treaties to agree to collectively tax carbon at a higher rate representing the harm across all those countries is even more economically efficient.

Do you apply this logic for everything?

Dumping your waste, others be damned, is a hell of a way to live.

>>Is that unreasonable

It’s not unreasonable to report the facts and let the reader decide. The carbon tax is a readily available fact where in your example is subjective.

Nothing you've said actually means anything.

The self-imposed tax is there and isn't going anywhere, so it's included in the price.

The other two points are accounted for in the strike price, because this capacity came into being and is now offering electricity at the strike price.

>isn't going anywhere

That's not true at all, Reform could get in and remove it day 1!

The government is literally comparing a raw price with a price+tax … and what makes this even more disingenuous is that the government themselves applied this tax. AND the tax is absurdly high!

> new power generation capability will need to be built to compensate for the intermittency of wind

The new wind power is mostly idling natural gas power plants, which can spin up on the rare occasions there's no wind in the North Sea. Then the UK only uses the expensive shipped LNG a few days a year. The much cheaper piped natural gas is already allocated.

Are you maybe comparing cost of gas as fuel with total cost? We will have a short period of low gas prices because there is oversupply of LNG projects coming online but that can turnaround easily. Flips in geo politics and crisis are popping up all the time.

Would you choose a 5.5% tracker mortgage, or a mortgage fixed at 9.1% for 20 years?

That's not the choice here though as the tracker mortgage (gas) is more expensive the the fixed on (Wind)

but it's not, though, is it?

The government is turning a £55 gas price into £147 by adding an arbitrary carbon tax, and therefore making it look artificially more expensive than wind.

If we wanted to make an honest analysis here, we would say "gas is significantly less than expensive than the strike price agreed for wind, but some believe the externalities of gas generation could be signficant"

The CPS charge is £18 per tonne of CO2, and all emitters pay for the CO2 they emit

The CPS charge isn't going away so it's not making gas look artificially more expensive than wind

When you're trying to sell wind power to the public as a "cheaper" source of energy than fossil fuels, you've got to be honest with them if you want to win both hearts and minds.

Gas is cheaper, like-for-like.

We impose special taxes on gas, making it artificially more expensive, in order to manipulate the market into reducing use of fossil fuel.

There. That's all that needs to be said. If you're honest with people they're more likely to trust you, and join you in your endeavours.

The high cost of gas is entirely politically-driven, as Reform UK will prove when they take office in 2029.

> the stated power capacity of wind generation is a theoretical maximum, and the actual capacity will be much lower in practice.

Capacity is constant. You're talking about capacity factor, i.e., average utilization. Numbers from 2018 for Danish offshore wind farms show capacity factors approaching 50%. These brand-new turbines mounted on 150 meters+ towers in the middle of the North Sea will absofuckinglutely beat that.

https://www.modernpowersystems.com/news/eight-new-uk-wind-fa...

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