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Comment by monsecchris | Hacker News Reader

Gas can produce enormous amounts of power at short notice 100% of the time and is cheaper per watt, nobody builds a 5MW twin cycle gas turbine power plant. There is a reason it sets the price at market. The CFDs are locked in at persistently high prices for decades. All these actions will increase costs to customers.

There is a reason our energy costs are the highest in the world, it is because our politicians persistently make choices like the ones described in this article.

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These prices are a lot closer. You can play around with the assumptions in the government's LCOE calculator spreadsheet linked from the article. Removing the carbon price and using pre-wind load factor of 75% gives a LCOE of £67/MWh, which is similar in cost to solar at £65/MWh and onshore wind at £72/MWh, albeit lower than offshore wind at £91/MWh.

Assuming future costs of gas will go down is risky too. UK North Sea production is falling and recovery costs are likely to increase as we are left with only more marginal deposits.

The UK hasn't produced enough gas in the North Sea to actually run the country for a very long time, maybe ever. Anybody who sells you a dream about British gas for British people isn't telling you the truth and it doesn't matter whether they are lying or incompetent, you can't trust anything they say.

America, Russia and a handful of other places could do this. It's probably a terrible idea, but it is technically possible. However Britain is not one of those places.

>is cheaper per watt

It isn't though? Even at high assumed load factor for gas wind beats it on LCOE £/MWh. [0] And not by a small margin either.

The only edge gas has is qualitative not price - it is dispatchable nature...and the cost of energy storage is in freefall. The trendlines here are not subtle.

>There is a reason it sets the price at market.

Yeah the sooner we get rid of ungodly expensive on demand peaker gas doing exactly that price setting the better for us all.

[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/696697d19d9b9...

It’s is categorically not cheaper per watt. Solar and wind are roughly £50/MWh and gas is £125/MWh. Not just LCOE but this is taking into account build cost. It’s insanely more expensive. What kind of low quality shill are you?

Is it cheaper factoring in externalities?

Externalities such as destroying your manufacturing base and eroding living standards and middle-class wealth by having 4x higher electricity costs than a country like China which emits 2x more CO2 per capita?

Rest assured that the UK would have damaged manufacturing and living standards regardless of renewables. It is just too complicated and expensive to build things. That not only damages the things you mentioned but renewables, gas and nuclear deployment.

But yeah bet against the Chinese solar and battery industries. And bet in favour of cheap plentiful gas in northern Europe.

> Rest assured that the UK would have damaged manufacturing and living standards regardless of renewables. It is just too complicated and expensive to build things. That not only damages the things you mentioned but renewables, gas and nuclear deployment.

High energy prices unquestionably make most primary and manufacturing production less competitive, and they reduce living standards. What are you even trying to say?

> But yeah bet against the Chinese solar and battery industries. And bet in favour of cheap plentiful gas in northern Europe.

This does not address what I wrote.

I was trying to say that high energy costs are just one issue. And even then renewables are not the root cause of high energy costs.

> I was trying to say that high energy costs are just one issue.

The one issue we were discussing.

> And even then renewables are not the root cause of high energy costs.

There is rarely one single root cause of anything. Renewables have certainly caused higher costs and worse service in some cases. I don't know the specifics of the UK, but you could argue the point with the above poster who said gas was cheaper.

I do know the specifics of the UK and that is what was being discussed here. But yeah dismissing anything that doesn't align with an easily argued point seems foolish to me.

Two can play the externalities game.

Yes, because the primary externality is an unreliable power grid. That externality is being priced into the unreliable sources of production.

Any other externality is a rounding error against an unreliable electric grid.

While I agree that the unreliable grid dominates I don't see how that says it's been factored in. The cost is hidden, pushed off onto the existing powerplants which run less of the time and thus cost more per kwh actually produced. This "works" until you don't have enough gas when it's calm and things go badly.

Most places simply do not have a high enough percentage of renewables to hit this yet. Last I knew Hawaii had hit a different wall--while in theory a transformer works equally well in both directions real world engineering of high power transformers doesn't work that way. The substations can't push power up, thus solar connections were prohibited if they could cause the situation to occur. (You can't have panels if too many of your neighbors do.)

Why don’t you disprove this instead of throwing random unproven anecdotes.

> This means they will help cut consumer bills, according to multiple analysts.

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