This is a lesson in how electricity isn't really a commodity e.g. it's very very difficult to send some electrons from one side of the world to another.
Heck, oil is probably the "default" example of what a commodity is, but we're now all acutely aware of what happens when moving that oil from one place to another becomes exceedingly difficult.
It is not. As a case in my point, Spain had a blackout last year (and I completely believe they are competent professionals - the task is just hard).
> It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.
They haven't been built because the grid isn't just a technical problem. It's also a socioeconomic problem, and adding new interconnections would require finding who needs to pay for it ; and currently, that question has no answer.
The difference of course is that the invisible hand of the market gets that fruit into grocery stores. For various relatively good reasons, power is driven by very visible hands.
"Brain surgery? Well, that's not exactly rocket science..."
Off the top of my head, we've recently had shortages of fresh strawberries because of weather in California, a shortage of peas because of weather too, and various changes in Trump's tariffs were done to try and alleviate the rising cost of certain fruit and veg.
If you want the commodities elsewhere, you have to provide for transportation. Same for electricity. Grids (or grid sections) where supply outpaces local demand and transmission to remote grids can hit negative spot prices even when neighboring grids haven't.
All the time? Every single HN discussion about this ends mentioning CfD, often as if it's some secret nobody knows about even though the CfD strike prices are often headline news when they're agreed.
not including $work discussions with energy traders.
Although this financial instrument dates from late last century, its use in energy markets is much newer, the UK began using CfDs for electricity about a decade ago.
So, yeah, if you recall conversation about wholesale electricity prices back in 2010 they wouldn't have mentioned CfDs for the same reason they didn't mention the effect of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it hadn't happened yet. Back then renewable electricity generation schemes were subsidised very differently.
https://www.desmog.com/2026/04/28/reform-donor-jeremy-hoskin...
> A major right-wing political funder has dramatically increased his fossil fuel investments this year, DeSmog can reveal.
> Jeremy Hosking, who owns the hedge fund Hosking Partners, donated £1.7 million to Reform UK between 2019 and 2024. The party, led by Nigel Farage, campaigns to scrap the UK’s flagship 2050 net zero emissions target, remove environmental protections, and turbocharge new fossil fuel extraction.
> Hosking also owns The Critic magazine, which frequently attacks climate policies and supports new North Sea oil and gas exploration. Its current edition carries a cover story titled “The Green Myth: Fossil Fuels are Britain’s Real Energy Source”.
...
> Its current cover story is written by contributing editor Chris Bayliss, who argues that renewable energy is unreliable and expensive. In a follow-up piece online, he blames “elite” support for net zero on “climate hysteria”.
> Bayliss is a former civil servant who works in the energy sector in Iraq. He’s the Iraq Country Lead for IM Power, which runs liquefied natural gas (LNG), oil and coal power plants, offers “oil and gas refining, storage and pipeline solutions”, and works to “maximise value from hydrocarbon resources
We have some of the most expensive energy in the world, what gives? I was told renewables were cheap
Would you rather be biased or blind?
Some of the most expensive fossil fuel energy in the world it's true. So, we should be striving to reduce that further, like Spain, right ?
But I'd actually be interested in seeing the underlying market data, even say for a week ago. Actually seeing the underlying offers really helps you to properly understand what the future looks like.
For example, right now wholesale is about £70 per MWh. What did the underlying bids and offers look like to hit that price ? How much CCGT was available for less than £50 ? 10MW ? 100 MW? 1 GW ?
I expect that you've modelled this as a sort of "All or nothing" situation but of course that's not how it works for electricity, which is why the underlying data would be interesting. That "guts" of a market help you understand the meaning of the surface numbers like a wholesale spot price or a week-in-advance price.
For example, you can see in the released data that spot prices can go negative without all the gas generation switching off. Some modest amount of CCGT will apparently pay money to the grid to stay running, sometimes for hours, despite lack of demand. Most of the gas goes away at negative prices, but some will still be there, so what's that about exactly ?
My guess (which the underlying data would help confirm) is that generators bid their "tick over" generation at a low price, perhaps even a negative price, so as to rarely need to switch off the generator and pay the considerable shutdown/ startup prices, but bid a lot more at a high price which covers their fuel and other expenses. Do they also have a further tier of pricing for running the generator at some sort of "red line" less efficient but more productive rate? I have no idea, and without the raw data or an inside knowledge of their companies there is no way to know.
Would burning more expensive gas during a gas price crisis have helped?
No, UCL research suggests that wind power saved over 100 billion (this is net of 45 billion in subsidies) from 2010 to 2023! And it continues to do so.
And that's after it got effectively banned from being built onshore for a decade in England, costing many billions more.
(Though, the world got lucky here as the CfD mechanism helped prove offshore wind was feasible, another British success story).
This is patronising drivel.
We burn gas when there is no wind & sun. We do this because there no alternative other than the lights going out. You are not seeing the whole.
When there is sun and/or wind we burn less gas.
Gas current and futures price for just the gas that needs burned (nothing about plant maintenance or carbon price to compensate for pollution or cost for building the plant or paying loans taken to build it etc.) is at 100, 90 and 80 pounds per MWh over the next 3 years.
That is more than the cost to build entirely new solar and wind, about double the cost of the best current projects, maybe 50% more than the average.
So even if you waved a magic wand and instantly solved several major world crisis affecting the price of gas, it still would be cheaper to build renewables in the UK than to buy just the gas alone.
This is true in the UK and basically everywhere in the world except maybe Russia, some parts of the middle east and the US Shale regions, but even there it's a close thing!
This has led to these being nearly 100% of all new electricity capacity built globally. Which only drives prices lower, and displaces gas and so makes gas cheaper than it otherwise would be too.
Didn't you start this thread by complaining about expensive energy?
We have the solution and you don't like it because you read news from magazines owned by people who pretend climate change isn't real.
Our energy is expensive and volatile because of this (and subsidies to implement it). You don't seem to be capable of following my argument. It's not a free lunch. Renewables are also slightly problematic for grid stability although I expect we will have enough fast storage / (possibly synthetic) inertia eventually.
"What if we don't fix the roof?"
"but it's sunny?"
You can add storage, which twenty five years ago looked completely impractical but it turns out actually no.
Just to illustrate the scale costs of energy moved in the form of natural gas:
Nord Stream 1 + Nord Stream 2 with combined capacity of the four pipes is 110 billion cubic metres per annum (3.9 trillion cubic feet per annum) of natural gas.
Calorific Value of Natural Gas from 34 to 52 MJ/m3
https://met.com/en/media/energy-insight/calorific-value-of-n...
So energy per annum for NS1+NS2 is between 3.74^18 J and 5.72^18 J. The maximal power throughput of NS1+NS2 is then between 118GW and 181 GW.
"According to Gazprom, the costs of the onshore pipelines in Russia and Germany were around €6 billion. The offshore section of the project cost €8.8 billion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_1#Costs_and_financ...
So the cost is about $123M per GW of capacity.
For comparison: the Biscay Gulf electricity interconnection
https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/cef-energy-bisca...
"The EPC contracts will cover two high-voltage direct current (HVDC) links (each with a capacity of 1000 MW, amounting to approximately 1600 km of HVDC submarine and land cables), the two converter stations and the civil works associated with the land cables."
2000 MW capacity with cost of EUR 2.85 billion gives:
1425M Eur per GW of capacity
Of-course the projects have been build decades apart so inflation plays a big role and Nord Stream pipelines are currently damaged.
What you really want is electric potential differences that push electrons. It's the difference between having oil and having hydraulic energy (pressure and flow rate).