Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

If you do go down this path, make sure you insulate the crap out of the cylinder and surrounding water pipes, mine only heats once a day and that's once the sun's providing the power for it.

Neat piece of open source software.

Over what time period, and where? My geothermal system draws about 1200 watts when heating our large house on the coldest days of the year

The freezer example would require like $10 of electronics assuming there isn’t already a WiFi chip in it.

The CfDs set a floor price when there’s lots electricity being generated by renewables but they also contribute to bills when the market price is over the strike price

Electricity bills are higher because we’ve had two fossils fuel shocks in the last 5 years and the costs for decarbonisation are added to electricity bills rather than gas ones

For instance, if I know it's going to be expensive when I'd be cooking tomorrow's evening meal, then I won't make something that would need a long time in the oven. And if it's going to be particularly cheap around lunchtime, then I'll plan to do a big load of laundry then.

I have electric heating, which I thought might be a cause of anxiety but it's not really worked out that way. The temperature in my flat won't go down by more than a degree or two with the heating off over the course of the sort of 4 hour price spikes you tend to see in mid-January. If it looks like it's going to be unusually bad, I could always raise the temp by half a degree beforehand, but in reality I've only bothered to do that maybe three times in the past couple of years.

Basically, it's just another thing to factor in when planning my day. No more of a hassle than checking the weather forecast or glancing at my calendar.

I watched a specific neighbor go through great pains to honor this system and so as to reap the benefits of a much lower bill. Sweating their buns off during the hottest part of the day, open windows, no tv on, etc. fully committed.

They saved 8 dollars that month. My vacant rental, not doing a goddamn thing, saved 6 dollars.

If your system is similar, you’re optimizing your life around the cost of a monthly Netflix subscription, at best.

For me I'm happy to avoid big power draws during the peak times, as I'm 'compensated' for it outside of those periods with a little planning. Downside is when the wind is not blowing AND disruptions to global energy markets - I'm exposed to that, warts and all, there's definitely been an increase in prices over the past 4 weeks, although there has been a few days (including today) where the wind has basically made the energy free and my average unit rate is dropping again.

I live on an island, we have big batteries that can supply up to 15 MW of power for a period. In the Netherlands we have natural gas plants that are called up when the wind or sun output decreases, lest the grid frequency drop.

There is no international market for gas because export/import is physically complex. This is why gas is priced very differently despite it being chemically similar (unlike oil). Anyone who says anything different should be immediately disregarded as someone who should not have an opinion.

This is technically true for oil but there are two other factors. One, importing oil is environmentally-intensive and relies upon the assumption of free and open trade in oil...hopefully, the last few weeks have demonstrated why this is untrue. Two, the assumption is that mix of imports is not changing, because of high energy costs and reduction in North Sea production, UK refineries are shutting down so we are completely losing domestic capacity across the whole space. We aren't importing oil, we are importing refined products, losing domestic chemicals capacity, losing margin. Lower jobs, lower tax revenues, more reliance on imports.

The above take would be somewhat funny if we weren't ten years into seeing the consequences of this. At this point, we could be back to the stone age and you would have the same people screeching that inventing fire is dangerous (I worked in equity research in the mid-2010s...I remember when Cameron was really pushing hard for this, Clegg was saying how expensive nuclear is, etc. people in the industry were saying this would very badly...the issue is that the political cycle is far shorter than the economic cycle, all of this stuff is obvious but people in the UK run on the political cycle so if it isn't the newspapers, no-one normal reads them, next week then it will never happen...same issue with housing, exactly the same thing happened, we are now subsidising retail electricity which is impossible to get out of, I remember specifically this idea was thought of as an insane impossibility but producers were saying it would have to happen, and giving huge subsidies to producers...this is all obvious, obvious things happening are obvious, producers were fine, they get paid the subsidies but consumers are getting shafted AND consistently voting to get shafted).

Also, Roughs storage facility is in the sea...so I am not sure what "real estate" development was done here (the UK has been building 10-20% of the required growth in housing stock for something like two decades...again, the same people will be screeching about developers if we lived in caves). The reason it was closed was due to economics.

For some reason, you deny that producing more gas would be useful but are outraged at a storage facility closing when the primary function of a storage facility is to allow energy producers to arb derivatives markets effectively. I have no idea how this makes sense to you based on all of the above...perhaps you just want to complain about the Tories? I have no idea.

The current tax rate on North Sea production is 75%, there was ample opportunity for public benefit but multiple governments took that money and spent it on benefits. The reason why Norway has worked is because they incentivized exploration (again, something that you imply later would have no benefit...but okay). The policy of the last fifteen years has been to tax the industry heavily and disincentivize exploration. Revisiting this approach is extremely unpopular amongst all politicians which is why production has dropped. Even with this limitation, we have large gas fields that have been blocked (by the Tories btw) for environmental reasons.

This isn't complicated: if you want more oil and gas, produce it and create more incentives to produce it. The reality is that people want to have their cake and eat it: North Sea production is both very pointless but paying huge amounts of carbon to import from the Middle East is a good idea and we have to pay subsidies of 30-40% electricity bills to subsidies green production...which is also very profitable but requires subsidies because of Tory developers or something.

The UK isn't a serious country. What is happening to the UK is a reflection of phenomenally poor political leadership. It is deserved.

I think gas is dirt cheap, heating your home and hot water with electricity is 4x more expensive and costs hundreds a month.

Post privatization domestic gas production rose 900%. Increasing supply = cheaper prices. Prices were low and stable at the time compared to today:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

This claim is the sort of dangerous ideological nonsense that is so common in Britain, and which has wrecked it. Literally every time socialist policies fail people come out of the woodwork to blame privatization, and yet invariably this made things better despite an often botched process. The American oil/gas industry is fully private and yet they have much cheaper energy: blaming Thatcher is dumb and not the answer.

Gas in the UK is expensive because successive British governments wanted to have nothing to do with it and did everything they could to crush the suppliers. They thought deliberately deindustrializing the country was moral and ethical, for "climate" reasons. So they:

• Imposed massive "windfall" taxes on the industry to the extent that nobody developed new sources

• Then imposed very high carbon prices on it

• Banned fracking

• Stopped issuing licenses for exploration

• Imposed price caps

• Chased all the industry that needed cheap energy away to Asia

• Shut down gas storage facilities, exposing Britain to the global spot price

• Didn't build other reliable energy sources like nuclear or coal

End result: high prices and shortages. There are graphs here that show how much of the British electricity price is artificially created by government:

https://davidturver.substack.com/p/why-is-my-energy-bill-so-...

Other countries didn't make all these mistakes together. And they were mistakes by the government. Really, can you even claim the British energy industry is private when the government takes 80%+ of its profits? Socialist policies always create shortages and high prices. Always.

Edit: puzzled by the blunt downvotes for stating a noncontroversial fact. Over the last 15 years the US has invested in shale gas while the UK and EU have banned it. Even today the UK refuses expension of North Sea gas extraction. Whatever the reasons (environment, decarbonisation) it does mean that the situation we have now with gas across Western Europe is policy, not an unfortunate consequence of world events...

You mention significant hydro and solar capacity in California. So minimal carbon externality: lung disease and climate change. If you consider that externalised cost into the cost of electricity elsewhere, does not California and other renewable-rich electric grids fare more competitive on price?

E.g. the problem is not the expensive renewables in California, rather, the problem is that the cost of declining human and animal health and climate change is externalised for the fossil fuel.

CA wants green energy now (aggressive targets), needs to have fire hardened infrastructure (expensive upgrades), and wants full service to sprawling remote areas using modern infrastructure.

The combination of these is incredibly expensive.

If you don't believe me, buy PGE stock and get your dividend from their "greed". But honestly, the stock is an awful performer, because the actual problems facing them are real.

How many is "many days"? Gas is still used for at least one fifth of electricity. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/5y/mont...

I used to work in wind energy in the Netherlands, it is only profitable there due to government subsidies. It was/is an enormously complicated system to understand on the whole. I was on the environmental impact side (visualizations) during the permitting process. It's high-risk & enormously expensive during the permitting process (i.e. getting permission to build the wind farm), and beyond that I understand it's a bidding process and again, super complicated on the energy trading side once you're operating. My experience was that the wind farm operators seemed to be doing well financially, but insanely lucrative? I'm not sure about that vs. non-renewables. Everyone I worked with (including myself) believed in green energy as a part of a larger mission to make the world a slightly better place. EU directives on renewables is what pushed the mission forward; the dutch on the whole (surprisingly), do not love wind turbines in their back yard.

Of course we’ll need a way to resolve fluctuations both rapid and slower. Rapid fluctuations are handled by pumped hydro and increasingly by batteries.

The slow fluctuations (day/night all the way to summer/winter and good/bad weather patterns) are much trickier, I think it’s still unclear how well handle them, but it will certainly be partly handled by having an excess of renewables, though we’ll likely need some other solutions too, nuclear is probably one of them.

This is how markets are supposed to work. It provides an economic incentive for production to increase, which is what we want.

Consider what happens if you develop a farming method to produce potatoes for a fraction of the usual cost, but you can only meet 10% of total demand at your local market. What price are you going to sell your potatoes for when you show up to the market? You (like any free market seller) want to maximise your return, so you'll be able to sell for a fraction under the previous market rate, undercutting everyone else. Your farming method would be extremely lucrative.

One system is taking the money and turning round and handing it to their fuel suppliers, the other is turning round and handing it to the people who loaned them money to build a giant complex structure that would take a decade or more of risk and uncertainty to pay itself back.

Gas bids high because it literally makes no business sense for them to operate for less than the gas input costs. They'd rather sit it out when electricity prices are lower. Renewables will take almost any price once built because wind and sun is free, but won't build in the first place without a path to paying off their investment over a certain timespan.

(This is why more solar has been built in places with good low risk finance than where the sunlight resource is strongest)

CfDs are a competitive bidding process and so give a market price for what developers need their price to be over 15 years or more for it to make a standard return on investment. Developers outside this process need to guess what electricity prices will be, at the times they generate for years to come.

And yes, letting nuclear power dwindle was a political choice, spurred by short termist bean-counter thinking:

http://www.stross.org.uk/charlie/old/rant/torness.html

Then when asked what method to price in the Swedish nuclear fleet having ~50% of capacity offline multiple times last year and France famously having 50% of the capacity offline during the energy crisis I always get crickets for answers.

It’s apparently fine when nuclear plants doesn’t deliver, but not renewables.

The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.

The video goes into much better detail but the keyword if you want to search yourself is "marginal cost pricing.

You can still have dispatchable gas without this pricing structure.

On any given day Germany generates 7-8% of its electricity from biogas, which means that if instead of burning that gas each day for electricity, we stored it in our network of gas reservoirs, then every 13 days of the year that we don't dip into those reserves, that's a full day of electricity generation in gas that's stored.

____

Even if this is done with fossil-gas instead of biogas though, simply having enough renewables + batteries to cut gas out of day-to-day electrical generation, and using it only for backup would be enough to drastically lower prices for the majority of the year.

That being said, the total cost per kWh could well reach 20c/kWh, which is ridiculous. It's not only not competitive against renewables, but also not competitive with natural gas (CCGT are probably around 10-15c€/kWh).

Newly approved Korean plans are aiming for 2038. Best of luck to them. I'm sceptical they'll make it.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/plans-for-two-ne...

Edit to add:

They used to be pretty fast but like everyone else seem to be slowing down significantly.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

It's great that we've made so much progress that people can say "it's just 90% renewable for 30 mins" but that's a result of decades of hard work.

That is not correct.

Small-scale solar capacity in California today stands at 19GW. In 2002, it was 45MW. That is a more than 400-fold increase. Title 20 and 24 rules have dramatically cut residential electric demand, especially lighting which has fallen by over 90%. Population grew 13% but peak grid load has not grown at all. But all that grid stuff to serve the new residents had to be installed and amortized. Many many things have changed since 2002.

The thing is, it's nowhere near 90% in general. 90% is the generation right now, with sunlight and good wind. On the site you can see that renewables were 66% in the last 24h, 46% in the last week, and 42% in the last year. I don't think it's possible to have 90% renewable generation overall without massive energy storage.

It kind of is.

Gas is the only source of electricity currently which can be scaled up and down at will and on demand.

Even once grids eventually go 100% green we will probably still use (green, synthesised) stored gas as the power source of last resort on cold, windless nights after batteries and pumped storage have been depleted.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-does-gas-set-the-price-of...

> In the UK, the marginal unit is almost always a gas-fired power plant. As a result, one widely cited academic analysis found that gas set the price of power 97% of the time in the UK in 2021.

"We send the UAE £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead"

"We send Saudi Arabia £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead"

"We send Qatar £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead"

Boreal forests in particular lose carbon sequestration capacity as they age, and from a carbon perspective cutting them down for lumber is a good thing. Wood pellets are generally from the waste material, not wood that could be used as lumber for houses or whatever.

You can certainly make other arguments in favor of not cutting down old growth forests, and certainly transport using fossil fuels is bad, but "I don't like how they go about it and also they release emissions that I don't care to understand how it fits into the carbon cycle" doesn't mean they "aren't renewable".

The point you could effectively make if you so chose would be "renewable energy sources are not cut and dry always a good thing".