I'm in the UK and am currently being paid to use electricity.
My energy provider uses a tracker tariff which can change every half hour (it does have a maximum cap to prevent the issues seen in Texas). Prices are currently negative, so every kWh I use right now means the electricity company pays me.
Nuclear promised energy which was "too cheap to meter". But solar actually delivered.
If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?
It seems silly, but actually... it's driving useful behavior I suppose. Then again, maybe a good government would notice this and just fast track grid storage rather than distribute that work to all the citizens.
A lot of the value to homeowners is essentially arbitrage on the retail cost of electricity: when prices are high you're going to be paying a lot more to pull electricity from the grid than you would be paid to supply it, so you're better off using up the buffer yourself as opposed to paying for electricity from the grid.
> If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?
Yes, some people do this. There's even a startup built around the idea: https://www.axle.energy/
Sure you could. How much do you think they will pay you per kw? 1/10 what you paid them and they will charge you for using their infrastructure..at least in the US they do.
There is no such thing as "the utility" in Europe. It is legally not allowed for a single company to both operate (parts of) the grid and trade in electricity.
I don't think that would ever commonly be viable or at least not for a long time. EV's are a lot more than batteries and are proportionally stupidly expensive.
If the electricity net arbitrage was worth the degradation of the battery then .... companies would do it themselves and just build the batteries for cheaper at scale.
>A UK energy company already has a Vehicle to Grid tariff.
And is that actually worth it to anyone who does the math?
An optimistic 161 pound saving compares to how many of my battery cycles for example? My car costs 50-60k so battery degradation is not nothing.
The battery is already a sunk cost. Doesn't matter how expensive the battery was if it's already sitting on your drive.
I did a quick fag packet calculation and even today 10% of everyones EV battery would be enough to cover the grid for an hour. That's enough of a buffer to spin up gas turbines for example, so you can actually shut them completely off.
>The battery is already a sunk cost. Doesn't matter how expensive the battery was if it's already sitting on your drive.
My Hyundai Ionic 6 rolling battery costs 50-60k.
Spending a cycle of it's battery is not a discardable cost.
Some will still take it but this seems just like a more deceptive version of those uber driver that get a pricey car and then find out that combined with maintenance, degradation/devaluation and other hidden costs they don't actually make that much driving around.
>I did a quick fag packet calculation and even today 10% of everyones EV battery would be enough to cover the grid for an hour.
I presume you deduct more than half of the rolling battery capacity out there.
You can't discharge those to 0% shouldn't charge them to 100%, many won't be charged fully (or connected)
+ If I need to leave in the morning like most I don't want to necessarily be dropping charge into the grid.
>My Hyundai Ionic 6 rolling battery costs 50-60k. Spending a cycle of it's battery is not a discardable cost
Problem is we don't have good data on actual costs. So we don't know if we're talking about something substantial or something hypothetical. Absent that data I think my comment is fair.
>I presume you deduct more than half of the rolling battery capacity out there
No. We are talking about 10% of battery capacity so your battery at 80% would only need to go down to 70%.
A problem we have in the UK at the moment is that we have gas turbines running even if not needed just incase the wind suddenly drops. It takes (or can take) about an hour to spin up a turbine from cold. So a battery supply that could cover that hour would mean we could use a lot less gas. Most of the time it isn't even used, and if it is, most probably won't use that full 10% and once the gas turbines have spun up it could recharge the batteries.
To link it back to the earlier comment, even if the maths is bad for EV as battery storage, you can still use it as battery of last resort. It would be expensive, so ev owners would still be up on the deal, but there would be a system on place to actually use them when actually needed.
Europe seems to be responding well since the Ukraine war, the picture now is a lot more positive than in 2022. The UK has postionined itself well, even without the mass uptake of local generation/storage in it's domestic market.
Electricity prices in the UK are painful, and galling when set by the price of gas, but it’s worth remembering that this model and all this expense has bought a major asset that will only become more important and strategic.
The next milestones to hit are:
* A 10x increase in generation capacity
* A 100x increase in storage capacity
* A 1000x increase in seasonal storage capacity
* Electrification of heating
* Electrification of synfuels and synthetic chemical feedstocks
Full energy sovereignty is achievable within 10 years at wartime-spending levels. Probably 30 years otherwise.
Rehabilitation of nuclear is almost certainly required for the transition and a very good hedge / backstop regardless.
Yeah, we're (UK) only just at the "occasionally cheap 100% renewables" state, and it's maddeningly slow progress. But it seems like a lot of things are suddenly coming online, like battery storage, and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years. https://eandt.theiet.org/2026/04/02/ps12bn-plan-upgrade-scot...
The transition will probably be quite nonlinear: getting from zero to a few days a year of 100% renewables is about as much effort as going from a few days a year to most of the year.
> and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years.
I hope not. We're currently getting shafted by National Grid pricing, and this is only going to mean we get to pay even more for electricity where it's generated while the south coast of the UK gets it cheap.
> Rehabilitation of nuclear is almost certainly required for the transition
Using nuclear means electricity prices will be set by the price of nuclear - which is even higher than the price of gas.
Besides, it is economically impossible to operate it as backstop as almost all of its costs are in paying back the construction loan: run it 10% of the time and its cost-per-kWh is increased by 10x, run it 1% of the time and its cost-per-kWh is increased by 100x. With that kind of budget there are suddenly a lot of alternatives to nuclear as generation-of-last-resort.
Electricity prices in the UK are painful, and galling when set by the price of gas
It's painful indeed. Today, I watched the price go negative as wind and solar reduced the gas contribution to about 3% of the mix. As that gas mix rose to 5%, the price turned around and became painfully expensive again.
I couldn't disagree more. I'm going to point to Gary Stevenson [1] for why. He could probably get to the point faster but here's the core premise: Europe responded to the energy shocks since 2020 by transferring the better part of a trillion euros to energy companies in the US and the Middle East, particularly for LNG.
Imagine where Europe might be if half a trillion euros was spent on renewables.
The core problem as he describes it is that European governments don't own these providers so it's a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the ultra-wealthy.
Back in the pandemic, Spain was one of the few countries that tackled the inflation shock in a better way with a windfall profits tax. Interestingly, Europe is talking about doing that now [2]. That would be smarter.
Energy prices disproportionately hurt the poor [3]. If the government owned or part-owned the energy (like Norway does) then you could offset that without burning cash to stick your head in the sand for a little bit longer.
And the reason Spain is so well insulated is because they have limited gas interconnection so they have a 'captive supplier' in Algerian gas. Algerian gas can basically only go to Spain, Morocco or the domestic Algerian market. They have some limited LNG export capacity (which is growing and will significantly change the price Spain pays longer term).
Spain has the advantage that solar is very effective because it's further south than most of Europe. Solar now seems to be 20-25% of Spain's electricity mix (and rapidly increasing). As cost the projected costs [1]:
> We anticipate low solar capture prices of close to €25/MWh in 2027 and €20/MWh in 2028
> And the reason Spain is so well insulated is because they have limited gas interconnection so they have a 'captive supplier' in Algerian gas
Interestingly, this is also a factor in US pricing of natural gas and oil. The hotly contested (and ultimately cancelled) Keystone SL pipeline was designing to bring energy products to a wider market and ultimately to raise prices. Don't believe anyone who tells you oil companies build pipelines to lower prices. As an aside, different pipelines were built instead without the same controversy.
When I was young they talked about a green revolution. Now with low solar panel costs, as well as batteries and inverters we really are living in a green revolution.
UK is legally required to set the price of electricity to whichever generator has the highest cost - which is natural gas. Its called marginal cost pricing.
It's worth thinking how this would work if it didn't work like this though? Nearly all 'commodity' markets clear this way.
If you switched to 'people get paid what they bid' it's almost certain the market would just converge back to this anyway - but with a lot more gaming and guesswork (wind guessing the gas marginal price to try and get the highest price).
Unregulated free markets optimizing for the least efficient, and highest possible price to the consumer? That's interesting, because its 100% the opposite of what I've been told my whole life.
It floats oil and gas profits with huge public subsidy while ensuring nobody in the market realizes benefits from alternate sources. It slows/blocks the transition.
Why would anyone address the additional challenges and reliability concerns of renewables, when oil can be purchased for the same price? What kind of incentive does that set up?
The idea behind the regulation is that it's providing the maximum incentive to bring cheaper electricity to market.
If you try to mandate that high cost producers charge less, they will do what makes sense to control costs and then quit altogether once they are losing money.
Yes of course but the spot market and associated futures has a very big impact on any "OTC" deal that a supplier and generator does.
Like you are not going to agree a eg 3 year supply deal with $SUPPLYCO at a significantly lower price than what you could get on the spot market for it (or what you could hedge out on futures).
That's how all commodity markets works. All of Europe runs on the same scheme.
Do you think the Saudi's price their $10 per barrel oil at $10? The average price? Median? Or marginal?
They price at at the marginal price.
In the UK what this means is that cheap production like renewables and storage are incentivized to get built while the most expensive fossil production is shutting down.
Then at some point renewables start to become to marginal producer and prices crater. Which is already happening.
Saudi's use the government to price their oil internally low... on the free market they sell it at the price dictated by supply and demand. Renewables and storage are disincentivized because oil and gas is legally blocked from ever taking a loss. Whats stopping O&G from raising prices to keep their marginal producer status and ensuring a race to the bottom?
How can they be legally blocked from ever taking a loss? It is a market. They bid.
There's a plethora of producers with varying equipment, startup times, ramp times, costs and so on.
As renewable penetration expands the most expensive, or least flexible ones are called in fewer and fewer hours until they shut down. If one oil and gas producer tries to raise prices a competitor steps in and fills the demand.
Did you think there was this one monopoly oil and gas power producing able to dictate prices at will?
> How can they be legally blocked from ever taking a loss? It is a market. They bid.
I don't know enough about oil & gas to tell you what is happening there, but not every market truly operates as a free market.
For example, nuclear power plants almost always have a contract with the government for a specific electricity price: if the market pays more the profits will go to the government, if the market pays less the government subsidizes production. Something similar happened with early wind power.
I believe that no governing party has attempted to fix this. Generally - this set up benefits the oil/gas lobby, so efforts to change it will butt heads with them. UK also trades energy with mainland Europe, which can add a complication with how prices are set.
Why should they? It's not the right time for that yet. Letting the price stay high despite renewable prices being lower means it's tremendously profitable to build new renewable sources, so there's lots of incentive for it to be done.
There's no incentive... Why invest in a less reliable source if you could endlessly purchase gas power for the same price? It slows the transition from fossil fuels and ensures that oil and gas never takes a loss.
I believe Centrica did some research before the Iran war and found that if we were able to get gas for free, energy bills wouldn't fall and would actually rise over the next few years (because of the mix towards structurally high cost supply).
It says something that the people running the monopoly cash machine are asking questions about bankrupting their customers/ability to pay but politicians are shutting their eyes and pounding onto the accelerator. What a world.
The issue though is that the UK spends something along the lines of £10-25bn (depending how you count subsidies) a year on renewable. Something like £10bn in direct subsidies via CfD and RO, then another ~£1.5-2bn on curtailment (paying wind farms to turn off), ~£3bn in balancing market costs, and £6bn on transmission upgrade costs (passed back to consumers/businesses) to upgrade transmission for nearly always renewable projects. There's actually a lot of others I think you could attribute to renewables but I could spend all day writing about this.
My guess is that £20bn/year is a fair cost overall in subsidy payments. This is clearly not offset by natural gas fuel savings even with elevated prices.
The UK IMO made a couple of critical mistakes. Firstly, far too much offshore wind is in Scotland when it should have been closer to population centres in England. A few factors for this but the issue is planning is devolved to Scotland (so they have every incentive to approve as many) but energy subsidies are set by Westminster. By the time UK central government realised this it was too late (or they didn't want to rock the cart for political reasons post/during Scottish independence referendum).
We're now having to pay £20-30bn+ to get Scottish wind generation down to England where it is needed (primarily through new 5 (!) 2GW HVDCs from Scotland to England). It would have been far far better just to... build those wind farms closer to England. This would have still required grid upgrades but far cheaper ones (bringing it 100-200km to population centres instead of all the way from Scotland, plus you still need to do the ones in England on top of that for the most part to get it from the HVDC landing sites to the population centres).
The second major issue is there is definitely massive diminishing returns from adding more renewables at this point. There's too many renewables on the grid a lot of the time, even if transmission was perfect - supply is outstripping demand. Instead of building more and more generation the subsidies should be redirected towards storage projects.
But overall, for the same £20bn a year you could have probably built 5 Hinckley Point C sized 3.2GW nuclear plants concurrently (assuming £4bn a year capex for 10 years). In 20 years you'd have probably 30GW of nuclear built, which should cover nearly all electricity demand in the UK in that time, with very limited transmission costs (existing nuclear plants have good grid connections and you build them close to them). And importantly, you would basically eliminate _any_ dependence on gas from the UK grid. Clearly nuclear has risks in project delivery, but at least it's reliable once built.
It's important to look at the whole picture though - most of the issues you raised are political issues, either brought about by NIMBYism or a lack of infrastructure investment over the past few decades. Without this investment (which, yes, is more expensive than it would be if it weren't also providing additional benefits tailored for renewables) the grid would continue to deteriorate. So clearly there is some amount of this cost that would need to be invested regardless.
There's also subsidies for fossil fuels to consider [0]. I don't hold these figures as gospel, but there's inarguably a massive amount of money going to propping up the (wildly profitable and hugely destructive) industry that's causing most of your raised issues in the first place - either through reduced maintenance and infrastructure investment (gotta get those shareholder returns) or lobbying/public influence campaigns.
To be clear - I absolutely agree with most of your complaints. I just see them as issues caused/exacerbated by entrenched political players, and I think the benefits to our society of getting off our fossil fuel addiction are worth the costs of modernizing our infrastructure for the long haul.
I'm certainly not saying we should stay on fossil fuels, my main point is that for the money that is being spent on various renewables could have been spent on a giant nuclear expansion at lower cost and far higher relability.
I don't really agree with this 'declining grid' narrative the renewable lobby has pushed. Yes there is upgrades to be done, etc etc. But peak UK electricity demand is down from ~65GW to ~45GW (which may change, but doesn't look to be).
Nearly all of the cost on the grid is to do with renewables, not 'general upgrades'. We would not be building 10GW of HVDC from scotland to england. We wouldn't be doing a drastic 275kV -> 400kV rerating and duplication in the middle of nowhere scotland otherwise.
Again, we're in agreement, and I yearn for a world with massive buildout of scalable nuclear power.
But what is this "renewable lobby", and how are they doing funding-wise against the various extremely well funded and deeply entrenched fossil fuel industry lobbying groups (and companies!) that have been pouring money into UK politics ever since they stopped setting UK foreign policy directly and overtly?
All I ask is that people take a step back and look at the whole picture, and then question whether their arguments benefit an industry that is responsible for so much damage and destruction (environmental, economic, human health, societal, political, etc.) or if their arguments benefit individuals and society as a whole.
Nuclear power built out in such a way as to achieve the original "too cheap to meter" goal would be a dream. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all that.
Isn't it better to build a decentralized grid out of standard parts than a few highly complex nuclear reactors? To me, that makes the system more resilient and easier to maintain. Nuclear seems like a worse choice long-term than wind/solar/batteries. Balcony solar could get us nuclear reactor levels of power per year once broadly legalized.
That's some pretty creative accounting to get to the 25bn mark. You also don't need to subsidise storage projects. They get built by market demand, as you can see by the amount being built and operated by energy trading firms who use them solely to buy power when the price is low and sell when high.
The planing issues were mostly due to the conservative party having a complete hate for onshore wind.
Nuclear fans are heavily underestimating the cost of that energy source. The levelized cost of energy per kWh today is TRIPLE that of solar already, at a negative learning curve, with a gap only widening (and accelerating so). For the very same cost per kWh, you can get double overprovisioned solar PLUS battery storage at 90% capacity factor, TODAY.
All of that fully decentralized, within the next years instead of decades, with distributed (not megacorp) ownership AND not having every other of these megaprojects cancelled due to protests.
And that figure doesn't even include externalized cost like national/environmental security or decommissioning costs.
The LCOE may be triple, but the LFSCOE [0] (full system cost, not just cost of generation) however of solar, is triple that of nuclear in Texas, and 15x that in Germany. Notice that 1. Solar Irradiance per location is actually taken into consideration and 2. Renewables have not stopped the ongoing deindustrialization of Germany due to high energy costs.
Civilian Nuclear Power is a dual use technology. The UK needs to subsidize it's civilian nuclear program if it wishes to also remain a nuclear power. The alternative is it de facto becomes the 51st state of America.
The UK needs to subsidize nuclear, as well as wind, solar, and everything in between.
There's a reason countries like the US, China, Japan, India, South Korea, and others are investing in this kind of domestic capacity and spending tens to hundreds of billions to do so.
Australia and Canada have enormous uranium deposits. We're not going to have an entirely British energy supply chain (solar panels are mostly from China, etc).
And it's a relatively small amount of mass to ship - perhaps 500 tonnes of yellowcake for a reactors' yearly requirement.
Australia has the world’s largest uranium reserves. Many European countries have their own supply and could produce it if they desired to be self sufficient.
Surely gas prices would spike if the UK needed to import enough to generate an extra 125TWh. And whilst we are waiting for nuclear to come online you still need to generate energy.
> But overall, for the same £20bn a year you could have probably built 5 Hinckley Point C sized 3.2GW nuclear plants concurrently (assuming £4bn a year capex for 10 years).
Planning began for Hinkley Point C in 20113. It was approved in 2016. Construction commenced in 2017-2018. It's hit major delays and is currently projected to come online in 2030. It could be delayed furhter. Unit 2 is expected about a year later [1]. Cost have ballooned to almost £50 billion [2] and may balloon further.
So you're looking at almost 20 years to build, £50 billion in costs and electricity production of ~3.2GW.
AFAICT that 3.2GW is ~7% of the UK's current electricity requirements so I'm not sure where you're getting "nearly all electricity demand". Also, 5 Hinkley Point Cs would be 16GW of electricity not 30GW.
Hinkley Point C has a contracted price of £133/MWh. I imagine there's some risk-sharing and inflation in the contract so this will probably go up. Compare this to £65/MWh for new solar and £72/MWh for new onshore wind [3]. Plus of course that wind and solar projects don't take 20 years to come online.
Lastly, the only way the per MWh costs can even get that low is by giving Hinkley Point C a 60 year lifespan to amortize the cost over a sufficiently large timespan. It's likely that as the plant ages, operational costs will significantly increase beyond what's projected.
Yes of course it's hit major delays, but my point is in hindsight had we started 5 nuclear plants (sort of as planned) around HPC construction start instead of spending the money on renewables, we'd have 5 plants coming online in (say) 2030. This would be nearly 50% of the entire UK supply. Another ~10 years later you'd have another 5, giving ~30GW of baseload.
And there's no reason we couldn't have used other reactor designs, apart from lack of financing so only EDF gambled everything on the EPR for HPC (again) and failed to deliver on time/on budget (again).
>Hinkley Point C has a contracted price of £133/MWh. I imagine there's some risk-sharing and inflation in the contract so this will probably go up. Compare this to £65/MWh for new solar and £72/MWh for new onshore wind [3]. Plus of course that wind and solar projects don't take 20 years to come online.
In 2012 prices HPC was £89/MWh. AR7 is delivering (in 2012 prices) offshore wind for ~£65/MWh.
But regardless these aren't comparable at all, for the reasons I set out above. That £65/MWh often doesn't include grid upgrades (which aren't required to nearly the same scale for nuclear, as they tend to be nearish existing population/demand centres and have existing grid infra). AND you still need (expensive) backup for that wind. We are building (right now!) new gas peaking plants that are allowed by law to only operate 10 days per year. The cost per MWh if you include that capex is horrendous.
>Lastly, the only way the per MWh costs can even get that low is by giving Hinkley Point C a 60 year lifespan to amortize the cost over a sufficiently large timespan. It's likely that as the plant ages, operational costs will significantly increase beyond what's projected.
Not true, HPCs 'agreement' is for 35 years. After that they just get the market price, so it is not based on the 60 year lifespan per se.
The UK's grid upgrades are a mix of the shift to renewables but also to handle anticipated increased demand, which will be needed regardless of the electricity source or location. I don't know what the mix is however.
> Not true, HPCs 'agreement' is for 35 years. After that they just get the market price, so it is not based on the 60 year lifespan per se.
Isn't this conceding the point that costs are going to go way up as HPC ages? Why else would you have a 60 year lifespan on a plan but 35 years of agreed pricing?
UK peak power demand has _reduced_ by 15GW in the past 20ish years.
Obviously there is some investment needed but if you take a look at the capex cost of the north Scottish grid upgrades PLUS the HVDCs it's pretty terrifying.
The idea is that the financing will be "paid off" after 35 years so it doesn't require a "guaranteed" price after that (it reduces finance costs significantly when HMG is underwriting the main payback period. I expect the remaining 25 years will be extraordinarily profitable for EDF. Even if there is more maintenance costs they will have no finance costs. And finance is the main cost of HPC (60-70% goes to interest payments on the debt).
How? The issue is local NIMBYs [0], anti-industry environmentalists [1], far left leaning groups [2], and even the fishing lobby [3] all attempt to obstruct wind farm expansion and make it difficult for moderates in Labour to actually execute on building energy independence for the UK.
Of course, this is also being amplified by information warfare by opponents to the UK [4][5], as can be seen by the social media campaign against offshore wind farms in the Isle of Man [6].
Frankly, the UK needs to internalize Fiona Hill's [7] position and start cracking down on fifth columnists like Farage, Corbyn, and their acolytes.
I mean offshore wind, not onshore. Thankfully most of the new ones are being built in England - check https://openinframap.org/#7.05/53.375/3.069, and these aren't curtailed.
But it was incredibly dumb to build many GW of offshore wind in Scotland when the grid was already over capacity.
> But it was incredibly dumb to build many GW of offshore wind in Scotland when the grid was already over capacity.
Isn't it equally dumb to continue to bet the entire country's economy on a tiny little bit of England (and then shame the other regions as unproductive layabouts when they don't produce as much tax revenue)? Energy production is not the only, nor even the biggest imbalance in UK resources. Maybe people and businesses should go where the energy is instead of waiting for it to come to them.
I don't quite understand. The opposition can't be that insurmountable for offshore wind off England coast (instead of Scotland) given 700 giant offshore turbines are being built as we speak off the English coast. Including the world's largest windfarm (Hornsea 3).
Look at the timeline of when Hornsea 3 and these projects were initiated - most of these projects broke ground 10 to 15 years ago.
The issue is the next generation of offshore wind projects in England is up in the air. This was why Hornsea 4 [0] was cancelled by Ørsted, how the Isle of Man has mobilized against the Mooir Vannin project [1] despite it having the potential to help Liverpool and Manchester, and the Shetland's project being cancelled due to the fishing lobby [2].
What is under construction today doesn't matter because those projects started a decade ago. What matters is whether new projects are being allowed or blocked.
We have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. The politicians obsess over net-zero at the expense of dealing with the issues affecting most people.
Part of the reason why we have high electricity costs (here in the UK) is that we peg the price to gas generation, on the face of it people complain about that but the higher price allows investments in renewables to make sense on an RoI PoV, effectively it's a subsidy to build out renewables at a higher rate than would otherwise be the case.
Electricity prices are high in the UK but there is a net benefit to it at least some ways, as always the devil is in the details, all the details.
Texas has some different choices in their electricity markets but they use the same pay-as-clear marginal pricing system that the above poster thinks is a secret UK plan to subsidise renewables. In reality it is the standard way to set the market price of commodities.
Texas famously had massive spikes in electricty prices and a near failure of the grid because of their electricity market structure, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
That's why I said kinda. Texas is part of the United States. The United States was the group that got uppity.
If 2 European powers had a war over a territory that is now part of a third country we would still describe the war as being between the 2 original countries. Even if other territories that weren't part of those nations at the time now are.
But yes, on the other hand we are talking specifically about Texas so maybe you're right.
On the 3rd hand the chance to get superior with the colonies should never be passed up.
That would be wonderful. But that hasn't happened yet, so i'll point out that whatever our current energy strategy is, it's failing miserably and wrecking the economy. For some reason other countries seem to have it figured out much better, so forgive me for not falling over in excitement over the fact that some war in the middle east is costing us a billion less then it might have.
Other countries are not likely spending much less on the transition, it's just that they're paying for it more in tax and less in the electricity bill. The UK's strategy here basically means there's now a huge amount of investment in renewables even without government subsidies. And the nature of renewables and relying on gas in the meantime (which has pretty much always been setting the price of electricity, it's just gotten even more expensive recently) means that there's a relatively more painful period of investment before you get to the cost benefits of a nearly entirely renewable grid.
Between Brexit and the aging population, I don't think joining the rest of the world in poisoning the atmosphere for the future faster is going to improve the UK's situation. There are much, much bigger fish to fry than energy policy for improvement-per-unit-effort.
The UK relies heavily on tourism. Tourism is disrupted by global instability. Climate change and fossil-fuel-catalyzed wars cultivate global instability. And the UK doesn't have the land or people to compete on the global stage in manufacturing exports (not that they do bad work, just that the scale doesn't exactly pan out. Not unless people are really keen on telling the tale of two cities again).
Best policy is likely to focus on domestic affairs (how to keep the country stable and solvent as the population shifts towards more and more retirees) and maybe look into rejoining that massive free-trade sector right down the block that the country so short-sightedly left a short time ago, since it'd really open up the tourism and trade markets.
Nice to see you again. Yeah, i feel it's a political thing where green initiatives are being pushed against the interest and benefit of voters. The benefits are continually overhyped and frankly in the UK we are seeing none of them. I actually quite like the idea of renewables and don't entirely understand Trumps pathological hatred of them, but i don't think politicians hamstringing our economy to win green points with their pals is a good thing. Also what's the plan here? Fall years behind the rest of the world while we switch over and then expect to magically catch up somehow?
We have policies that are good in principal but when they interact with other policy become unworkable for a reasonable cost. But then you focus on one individual area of policy rather than the system as a whole.
Also, in my experience the green initiatives generally have terrible publicity and these kind of articles are just pointing out some positives in a sea of negatives. What we endlessly miss is that the British public generally wants Co2 reduced and have got that.
The "political thing" is the oil industry working hard to make you feel like going renewable is a "political thing". It's a matter of life-or-death for them that you believe their lies.
If you like the idea of renewables take some time to understand the economics instead of spouting the same tired lies.
They don't "hamstring the economy". Nor will adopting them cause you to "fall behind". The "rest of the world" is rapidly adopting renewables.
Turns out I'm actually on 20p from a fix from last year, I was just grabbing some representative numbers off the website. Also this discussion has reminded me to put in a meter reading.
> my electricity has been free to negative all day
Like a gambler who only talks about their wins, people on these smart energy plans on the few days it goes very cheap only seem to pipe up with the current low unit price, and never mention their longer-term moving-average unit price...
Does this cancel out the high energy prices people in the UK have been paying for the past decade+? Part of the reason the bills are high is because they subsidise the installation of renewable generation.
Is it obvious? Do you have the figures? One month of £1bn savings vs what cost over the last 20 years?
I support the roll out of renewables. I worked for a renewable energy company in the UK.
I just think a lot of consumers (industry and residential) have had to pay a very high price to get to the current situation. And lots of foreign private and other institutional (the Crown) organisations have benefitted most from this fast but expensive transition.
I'm in the UK and am currently being paid to use electricity.
My energy provider uses a tracker tariff which can change every half hour (it does have a maximum cap to prevent the issues seen in Texas). Prices are currently negative, so every kWh I use right now means the electricity company pays me.
Nuclear promised energy which was "too cheap to meter". But solar actually delivered.
If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?
It seems silly, but actually... it's driving useful behavior I suppose. Then again, maybe a good government would notice this and just fast track grid storage rather than distribute that work to all the citizens.
Yes. I have a 4.8kWh battery which is slurping up electrons. It charges either from our solar panels or from cheap grid electricity.
It discharges when prices are high. So it'll mostly go into my oven tonight. If export prices are high, it can also sell back.
Very roughly, we sell about 16% of our stored electricity - the rest is used by our home.
See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/02/30-months-to-3mwh-some-more...
A lot of the value to homeowners is essentially arbitrage on the retail cost of electricity: when prices are high you're going to be paying a lot more to pull electricity from the grid than you would be paid to supply it, so you're better off using up the buffer yourself as opposed to paying for electricity from the grid.
> If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?
Yes, some people do this. There's even a startup built around the idea: https://www.axle.energy/
Sure you could. How much do you think they will pay you per kw? 1/10 what you paid them and they will charge you for using their infrastructure..at least in the US they do.
Someone at the utility went through the same math you are and decided it isn't worth it at scale. It's probably not worth it at small scale.
The UK is world leading in battery rollout because someone did the sums and decided it did make sense at scale.
Or it is! And they can do it cheaper at-scale than you can.
Back of the envelope I did one time told me i could earn more by picking up cans off the street and trading them for the deposit.
Still, it would feel nice - after the initial cost- to have very cheap power (only charge when cheap).
There is no such thing as "the utility" in Europe. It is legally not allowed for a single company to both operate (parts of) the grid and trade in electricity.
Overall on it's own that isn't yet profitable to do, unless you're e.g. a wind producer.
Yes, I believe some EVs allow this too.
I don't think that would ever commonly be viable or at least not for a long time. EV's are a lot more than batteries and are proportionally stupidly expensive. If the electricity net arbitrage was worth the degradation of the battery then .... companies would do it themselves and just build the batteries for cheaper at scale.
It is commercially viable. A UK energy company already has a Vehicle to Grid tariff.
https://octopus.energy/power-pack/
See also https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/case-study-uk-electric...
>A UK energy company already has a Vehicle to Grid tariff.
And is that actually worth it to anyone who does the math? An optimistic 161 pound saving compares to how many of my battery cycles for example? My car costs 50-60k so battery degradation is not nothing.
The battery is already a sunk cost. Doesn't matter how expensive the battery was if it's already sitting on your drive.
I did a quick fag packet calculation and even today 10% of everyones EV battery would be enough to cover the grid for an hour. That's enough of a buffer to spin up gas turbines for example, so you can actually shut them completely off.
>The battery is already a sunk cost. Doesn't matter how expensive the battery was if it's already sitting on your drive.
My Hyundai Ionic 6 rolling battery costs 50-60k. Spending a cycle of it's battery is not a discardable cost.
Some will still take it but this seems just like a more deceptive version of those uber driver that get a pricey car and then find out that combined with maintenance, degradation/devaluation and other hidden costs they don't actually make that much driving around.
>I did a quick fag packet calculation and even today 10% of everyones EV battery would be enough to cover the grid for an hour.
I presume you deduct more than half of the rolling battery capacity out there. You can't discharge those to 0% shouldn't charge them to 100%, many won't be charged fully (or connected) + If I need to leave in the morning like most I don't want to necessarily be dropping charge into the grid.
>My Hyundai Ionic 6 rolling battery costs 50-60k. Spending a cycle of it's battery is not a discardable cost
Problem is we don't have good data on actual costs. So we don't know if we're talking about something substantial or something hypothetical. Absent that data I think my comment is fair.
>I presume you deduct more than half of the rolling battery capacity out there
No. We are talking about 10% of battery capacity so your battery at 80% would only need to go down to 70%.
A problem we have in the UK at the moment is that we have gas turbines running even if not needed just incase the wind suddenly drops. It takes (or can take) about an hour to spin up a turbine from cold. So a battery supply that could cover that hour would mean we could use a lot less gas. Most of the time it isn't even used, and if it is, most probably won't use that full 10% and once the gas turbines have spun up it could recharge the batteries.
To link it back to the earlier comment, even if the maths is bad for EV as battery storage, you can still use it as battery of last resort. It would be expensive, so ev owners would still be up on the deal, but there would be a system on place to actually use them when actually needed.
Like an EV....
Batteries are getting affordable too - Fogstar do a 16kWh battery for around £2000. Plus, grid scale iron-air batteries sound promising.
Have you got one? Looking for installation options.
[dead]
Europe seems to be responding well since the Ukraine war, the picture now is a lot more positive than in 2022. The UK has postionined itself well, even without the mass uptake of local generation/storage in it's domestic market.
Electricity prices in the UK are painful, and galling when set by the price of gas, but it’s worth remembering that this model and all this expense has bought a major asset that will only become more important and strategic.
The next milestones to hit are:
* A 10x increase in generation capacity
* A 100x increase in storage capacity
* A 1000x increase in seasonal storage capacity
* Electrification of heating
* Electrification of synfuels and synthetic chemical feedstocks
Full energy sovereignty is achievable within 10 years at wartime-spending levels. Probably 30 years otherwise.
Rehabilitation of nuclear is almost certainly required for the transition and a very good hedge / backstop regardless.
Yeah, we're (UK) only just at the "occasionally cheap 100% renewables" state, and it's maddeningly slow progress. But it seems like a lot of things are suddenly coming online, like battery storage, and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years. https://eandt.theiet.org/2026/04/02/ps12bn-plan-upgrade-scot...
The transition will probably be quite nonlinear: getting from zero to a few days a year of 100% renewables is about as much effort as going from a few days a year to most of the year.
Plug in solar could be like that.
> and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years.
I hope not. We're currently getting shafted by National Grid pricing, and this is only going to mean we get to pay even more for electricity where it's generated while the south coast of the UK gets it cheap.
We get that now. They were looking in to zonal pricing last year but backed out.
> Rehabilitation of nuclear is almost certainly required for the transition
Using nuclear means electricity prices will be set by the price of nuclear - which is even higher than the price of gas.
Besides, it is economically impossible to operate it as backstop as almost all of its costs are in paying back the construction loan: run it 10% of the time and its cost-per-kWh is increased by 10x, run it 1% of the time and its cost-per-kWh is increased by 100x. With that kind of budget there are suddenly a lot of alternatives to nuclear as generation-of-last-resort.
Electricity prices in the UK are painful, and galling when set by the price of gas
It's painful indeed. Today, I watched the price go negative as wind and solar reduced the gas contribution to about 3% of the mix. As that gas mix rose to 5%, the price turned around and became painfully expensive again.
The UK has positioned itself almost uniquely poorly in Europe. That is why its government bond prices are trading at a premium to the others.
I couldn't disagree more. I'm going to point to Gary Stevenson [1] for why. He could probably get to the point faster but here's the core premise: Europe responded to the energy shocks since 2020 by transferring the better part of a trillion euros to energy companies in the US and the Middle East, particularly for LNG.
Imagine where Europe might be if half a trillion euros was spent on renewables.
The core problem as he describes it is that European governments don't own these providers so it's a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the ultra-wealthy.
Back in the pandemic, Spain was one of the few countries that tackled the inflation shock in a better way with a windfall profits tax. Interestingly, Europe is talking about doing that now [2]. That would be smarter.
Energy prices disproportionately hurt the poor [3]. If the government owned or part-owned the energy (like Norway does) then you could offset that without burning cash to stick your head in the sand for a little bit longer.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi265I48MdI
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/04/europe-energy-windfall-profi...
[3]: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2023/rising-household...
The UK had/has the exact same windfall tax on energy:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-gener... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-profits-le...
And the reason Spain is so well insulated is because they have limited gas interconnection so they have a 'captive supplier' in Algerian gas. Algerian gas can basically only go to Spain, Morocco or the domestic Algerian market. They have some limited LNG export capacity (which is growing and will significantly change the price Spain pays longer term).
Spain has the advantage that solar is very effective because it's further south than most of Europe. Solar now seems to be 20-25% of Spain's electricity mix (and rapidly increasing). As cost the projected costs [1]:
> We anticipate low solar capture prices of close to €25/MWh in 2027 and €20/MWh in 2028
> And the reason Spain is so well insulated is because they have limited gas interconnection so they have a 'captive supplier' in Algerian gas
Interestingly, this is also a factor in US pricing of natural gas and oil. The hotly contested (and ultimately cancelled) Keystone SL pipeline was designing to bring energy products to a wider market and ultimately to raise prices. Don't believe anyone who tells you oil companies build pipelines to lower prices. As an aside, different pipelines were built instead without the same controversy.
[1]: https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/spain...
Useful background on Mr. Stevenson
https://www.ft.com/content/7e8b47b3-7931-4354-9e8a-47d75d057...
Everyone on TV gobbing off about anything is a grifter.
When I was young they talked about a green revolution. Now with low solar panel costs, as well as batteries and inverters we really are living in a green revolution.
So everything should be cheaper right...RIGHT?
UK is legally required to set the price of electricity to whichever generator has the highest cost - which is natural gas. Its called marginal cost pricing.
It's worth thinking how this would work if it didn't work like this though? Nearly all 'commodity' markets clear this way.
If you switched to 'people get paid what they bid' it's almost certain the market would just converge back to this anyway - but with a lot more gaming and guesswork (wind guessing the gas marginal price to try and get the highest price).
Unregulated free markets optimizing for the least efficient, and highest possible price to the consumer? That's interesting, because its 100% the opposite of what I've been told my whole life.
It's not the highest possible price, it's roughly the same price but with less transparency and some fudge factors added due to uncertainty.
In a world where renewables are cheaper the transparency speeds the transition
It floats oil and gas profits with huge public subsidy while ensuring nobody in the market realizes benefits from alternate sources. It slows/blocks the transition.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
I'm open to the idea that oil and gas are protected and subsidized in many different ways.
Accurate information on how much more they costs than renewables I don't see the link.
Accurate prices are good. Actions that stop the market acting on the accurate prices are bad.
Why would anyone address the additional challenges and reliability concerns of renewables, when oil can be purchased for the same price? What kind of incentive does that set up?
Why do you see it that way?
The idea behind the regulation is that it's providing the maximum incentive to bring cheaper electricity to market.
If you try to mandate that high cost producers charge less, they will do what makes sense to control costs and then quit altogether once they are losing money.
That's only true for spot pricing, right? Longer term supply contracts can embody more "strategic" criteria.
Yes of course but the spot market and associated futures has a very big impact on any "OTC" deal that a supplier and generator does.
Like you are not going to agree a eg 3 year supply deal with $SUPPLYCO at a significantly lower price than what you could get on the spot market for it (or what you could hedge out on futures).
That's how all commodity markets works. All of Europe runs on the same scheme.
Do you think the Saudi's price their $10 per barrel oil at $10? The average price? Median? Or marginal?
They price at at the marginal price.
In the UK what this means is that cheap production like renewables and storage are incentivized to get built while the most expensive fossil production is shutting down.
Then at some point renewables start to become to marginal producer and prices crater. Which is already happening.
Saudi's use the government to price their oil internally low... on the free market they sell it at the price dictated by supply and demand. Renewables and storage are disincentivized because oil and gas is legally blocked from ever taking a loss. Whats stopping O&G from raising prices to keep their marginal producer status and ensuring a race to the bottom?
How can they be legally blocked from ever taking a loss? It is a market. They bid.
There's a plethora of producers with varying equipment, startup times, ramp times, costs and so on.
As renewable penetration expands the most expensive, or least flexible ones are called in fewer and fewer hours until they shut down. If one oil and gas producer tries to raise prices a competitor steps in and fills the demand.
Did you think there was this one monopoly oil and gas power producing able to dictate prices at will?
> How can they be legally blocked from ever taking a loss? It is a market. They bid.
I don't know enough about oil & gas to tell you what is happening there, but not every market truly operates as a free market.
For example, nuclear power plants almost always have a contract with the government for a specific electricity price: if the market pays more the profits will go to the government, if the market pays less the government subsidizes production. Something similar happened with early wind power.
Yes, that is a CFD. CFDs are allocated in bidding processes to get them as cheaply as possible.
Oil and gas plants in Europe are very much not on CFDs. They can bid out their power using futures. But that is like any other market.
Are there any efforts to fix this?
More renewables and batteries so that gas generators wouldn't have any leftover capacity to bid for.
I believe that no governing party has attempted to fix this. Generally - this set up benefits the oil/gas lobby, so efforts to change it will butt heads with them. UK also trades energy with mainland Europe, which can add a complication with how prices are set.
Why should they? It's not the right time for that yet. Letting the price stay high despite renewable prices being lower means it's tremendously profitable to build new renewable sources, so there's lots of incentive for it to be done.
There's no incentive... Why invest in a less reliable source if you could endlessly purchase gas power for the same price? It slows the transition from fossil fuels and ensures that oil and gas never takes a loss.
Because the sun is free but you can sell it like it's gas.
This is amazing news. I look forward to my bills going up again next month!
I believe Centrica did some research before the Iran war and found that if we were able to get gas for free, energy bills wouldn't fall and would actually rise over the next few years (because of the mix towards structurally high cost supply).
It says something that the people running the monopoly cash machine are asking questions about bankrupting their customers/ability to pay but politicians are shutting their eyes and pounding onto the accelerator. What a world.
Why are people making (intentionally?) vague statements about prices going up?
Are you referring to the war Trump started, or are you all climate denying loons who love Trump and think net-zero is a Chinese hoax?
Or just nihilists that just think the world is going to shit in multiple ways and refuse to even contemplate small silver linings on dark clouds?
It's impossible to tell from these quips.
Only 3 certainties in life; death, taxes and the cost of everything going up every year.
And people not being able to count apparently...
These are people attempting to convince themselves.
The issue though is that the UK spends something along the lines of £10-25bn (depending how you count subsidies) a year on renewable. Something like £10bn in direct subsidies via CfD and RO, then another ~£1.5-2bn on curtailment (paying wind farms to turn off), ~£3bn in balancing market costs, and £6bn on transmission upgrade costs (passed back to consumers/businesses) to upgrade transmission for nearly always renewable projects. There's actually a lot of others I think you could attribute to renewables but I could spend all day writing about this.
My guess is that £20bn/year is a fair cost overall in subsidy payments. This is clearly not offset by natural gas fuel savings even with elevated prices.
The UK IMO made a couple of critical mistakes. Firstly, far too much offshore wind is in Scotland when it should have been closer to population centres in England. A few factors for this but the issue is planning is devolved to Scotland (so they have every incentive to approve as many) but energy subsidies are set by Westminster. By the time UK central government realised this it was too late (or they didn't want to rock the cart for political reasons post/during Scottish independence referendum).
We're now having to pay £20-30bn+ to get Scottish wind generation down to England where it is needed (primarily through new 5 (!) 2GW HVDCs from Scotland to England). It would have been far far better just to... build those wind farms closer to England. This would have still required grid upgrades but far cheaper ones (bringing it 100-200km to population centres instead of all the way from Scotland, plus you still need to do the ones in England on top of that for the most part to get it from the HVDC landing sites to the population centres).
The second major issue is there is definitely massive diminishing returns from adding more renewables at this point. There's too many renewables on the grid a lot of the time, even if transmission was perfect - supply is outstripping demand. Instead of building more and more generation the subsidies should be redirected towards storage projects.
But overall, for the same £20bn a year you could have probably built 5 Hinckley Point C sized 3.2GW nuclear plants concurrently (assuming £4bn a year capex for 10 years). In 20 years you'd have probably 30GW of nuclear built, which should cover nearly all electricity demand in the UK in that time, with very limited transmission costs (existing nuclear plants have good grid connections and you build them close to them). And importantly, you would basically eliminate _any_ dependence on gas from the UK grid. Clearly nuclear has risks in project delivery, but at least it's reliable once built.
It's important to look at the whole picture though - most of the issues you raised are political issues, either brought about by NIMBYism or a lack of infrastructure investment over the past few decades. Without this investment (which, yes, is more expensive than it would be if it weren't also providing additional benefits tailored for renewables) the grid would continue to deteriorate. So clearly there is some amount of this cost that would need to be invested regardless.
There's also subsidies for fossil fuels to consider [0]. I don't hold these figures as gospel, but there's inarguably a massive amount of money going to propping up the (wildly profitable and hugely destructive) industry that's causing most of your raised issues in the first place - either through reduced maintenance and infrastructure investment (gotta get those shareholder returns) or lobbying/public influence campaigns.
To be clear - I absolutely agree with most of your complaints. I just see them as issues caused/exacerbated by entrenched political players, and I think the benefits to our society of getting off our fossil fuel addiction are worth the costs of modernizing our infrastructure for the long haul.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/09/fossil-f...
I'm certainly not saying we should stay on fossil fuels, my main point is that for the money that is being spent on various renewables could have been spent on a giant nuclear expansion at lower cost and far higher relability.
I don't really agree with this 'declining grid' narrative the renewable lobby has pushed. Yes there is upgrades to be done, etc etc. But peak UK electricity demand is down from ~65GW to ~45GW (which may change, but doesn't look to be).
Nearly all of the cost on the grid is to do with renewables, not 'general upgrades'. We would not be building 10GW of HVDC from scotland to england. We wouldn't be doing a drastic 275kV -> 400kV rerating and duplication in the middle of nowhere scotland otherwise.
Again, we're in agreement, and I yearn for a world with massive buildout of scalable nuclear power.
But what is this "renewable lobby", and how are they doing funding-wise against the various extremely well funded and deeply entrenched fossil fuel industry lobbying groups (and companies!) that have been pouring money into UK politics ever since they stopped setting UK foreign policy directly and overtly?
All I ask is that people take a step back and look at the whole picture, and then question whether their arguments benefit an industry that is responsible for so much damage and destruction (environmental, economic, human health, societal, political, etc.) or if their arguments benefit individuals and society as a whole.
Nuclear power built out in such a way as to achieve the original "too cheap to meter" goal would be a dream. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all that.
Isn't it better to build a decentralized grid out of standard parts than a few highly complex nuclear reactors? To me, that makes the system more resilient and easier to maintain. Nuclear seems like a worse choice long-term than wind/solar/batteries. Balcony solar could get us nuclear reactor levels of power per year once broadly legalized.
That's some pretty creative accounting to get to the 25bn mark. You also don't need to subsidise storage projects. They get built by market demand, as you can see by the amount being built and operated by energy trading firms who use them solely to buy power when the price is low and sell when high.
The planing issues were mostly due to the conservative party having a complete hate for onshore wind.
Nuclear fans are heavily underestimating the cost of that energy source. The levelized cost of energy per kWh today is TRIPLE that of solar already, at a negative learning curve, with a gap only widening (and accelerating so). For the very same cost per kWh, you can get double overprovisioned solar PLUS battery storage at 90% capacity factor, TODAY.
All of that fully decentralized, within the next years instead of decades, with distributed (not megacorp) ownership AND not having every other of these megaprojects cancelled due to protests.
And that figure doesn't even include externalized cost like national/environmental security or decommissioning costs.
Nuclear is riding a dead horse in 2026.
The LCOE may be triple, but the LFSCOE [0] (full system cost, not just cost of generation) however of solar, is triple that of nuclear in Texas, and 15x that in Germany. Notice that 1. Solar Irradiance per location is actually taken into consideration and 2. Renewables have not stopped the ongoing deindustrialization of Germany due to high energy costs.
[0] (PDF) https://iaee2021online.org/download/contribution/fullpaper/1...
Civilian Nuclear Power is a dual use technology. The UK needs to subsidize it's civilian nuclear program if it wishes to also remain a nuclear power. The alternative is it de facto becomes the 51st state of America.
The UK needs to subsidize nuclear, as well as wind, solar, and everything in between.
There's a reason countries like the US, China, Japan, India, South Korea, and others are investing in this kind of domestic capacity and spending tens to hundreds of billions to do so.
The half life of uranium and plutonium is 1000s of years?
Unless the UK is planning on increasing it's number of nukes why would it need more cores?
Why replace oil dependency with uranium dependency (presumably from Russia)? Costs are not the only consideration.
Australia and Canada have enormous uranium deposits. We're not going to have an entirely British energy supply chain (solar panels are mostly from China, etc).
And it's a relatively small amount of mass to ship - perhaps 500 tonnes of yellowcake for a reactors' yearly requirement.
Australia has the world’s largest uranium reserves. Many European countries have their own supply and could produce it if they desired to be self sufficient.
Surely gas prices would spike if the UK needed to import enough to generate an extra 125TWh. And whilst we are waiting for nuclear to come online you still need to generate energy.
> But overall, for the same £20bn a year you could have probably built 5 Hinckley Point C sized 3.2GW nuclear plants concurrently (assuming £4bn a year capex for 10 years).
Planning began for Hinkley Point C in 20113. It was approved in 2016. Construction commenced in 2017-2018. It's hit major delays and is currently projected to come online in 2030. It could be delayed furhter. Unit 2 is expected about a year later [1]. Cost have ballooned to almost £50 billion [2] and may balloon further.
So you're looking at almost 20 years to build, £50 billion in costs and electricity production of ~3.2GW.
AFAICT that 3.2GW is ~7% of the UK's current electricity requirements so I'm not sure where you're getting "nearly all electricity demand". Also, 5 Hinkley Point Cs would be 16GW of electricity not 30GW.
Hinkley Point C has a contracted price of £133/MWh. I imagine there's some risk-sharing and inflation in the contract so this will probably go up. Compare this to £65/MWh for new solar and £72/MWh for new onshore wind [3]. Plus of course that wind and solar projects don't take 20 years to come online.
Lastly, the only way the per MWh costs can even get that low is by giving Hinkley Point C a 60 year lifespan to amortize the cost over a sufficiently large timespan. It's likely that as the plant ages, operational costs will significantly increase beyond what's projected.
[1]: https://eandt.theiet.org/2026/02/23/hinkley-point-c-faces-fu...
[2]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/02/20/hinkley-poin...
[3]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-new-uk-onshore-wind-and-solar...
Yes of course it's hit major delays, but my point is in hindsight had we started 5 nuclear plants (sort of as planned) around HPC construction start instead of spending the money on renewables, we'd have 5 plants coming online in (say) 2030. This would be nearly 50% of the entire UK supply. Another ~10 years later you'd have another 5, giving ~30GW of baseload.
And there's no reason we couldn't have used other reactor designs, apart from lack of financing so only EDF gambled everything on the EPR for HPC (again) and failed to deliver on time/on budget (again).
>Hinkley Point C has a contracted price of £133/MWh. I imagine there's some risk-sharing and inflation in the contract so this will probably go up. Compare this to £65/MWh for new solar and £72/MWh for new onshore wind [3]. Plus of course that wind and solar projects don't take 20 years to come online.
In 2012 prices HPC was £89/MWh. AR7 is delivering (in 2012 prices) offshore wind for ~£65/MWh.
But regardless these aren't comparable at all, for the reasons I set out above. That £65/MWh often doesn't include grid upgrades (which aren't required to nearly the same scale for nuclear, as they tend to be nearish existing population/demand centres and have existing grid infra). AND you still need (expensive) backup for that wind. We are building (right now!) new gas peaking plants that are allowed by law to only operate 10 days per year. The cost per MWh if you include that capex is horrendous.
>Lastly, the only way the per MWh costs can even get that low is by giving Hinkley Point C a 60 year lifespan to amortize the cost over a sufficiently large timespan. It's likely that as the plant ages, operational costs will significantly increase beyond what's projected.
Not true, HPCs 'agreement' is for 35 years. After that they just get the market price, so it is not based on the 60 year lifespan per se.
The UK's grid upgrades are a mix of the shift to renewables but also to handle anticipated increased demand, which will be needed regardless of the electricity source or location. I don't know what the mix is however.
> Not true, HPCs 'agreement' is for 35 years. After that they just get the market price, so it is not based on the 60 year lifespan per se.
Isn't this conceding the point that costs are going to go way up as HPC ages? Why else would you have a 60 year lifespan on a plan but 35 years of agreed pricing?
UK peak power demand has _reduced_ by 15GW in the past 20ish years.
Obviously there is some investment needed but if you take a look at the capex cost of the north Scottish grid upgrades PLUS the HVDCs it's pretty terrifying.
The idea is that the financing will be "paid off" after 35 years so it doesn't require a "guaranteed" price after that (it reduces finance costs significantly when HMG is underwriting the main payback period. I expect the remaining 25 years will be extraordinarily profitable for EDF. Even if there is more maintenance costs they will have no finance costs. And finance is the main cost of HPC (60-70% goes to interest payments on the debt).
> build those wind farms closer to England
How? The issue is local NIMBYs [0], anti-industry environmentalists [1], far left leaning groups [2], and even the fishing lobby [3] all attempt to obstruct wind farm expansion and make it difficult for moderates in Labour to actually execute on building energy independence for the UK.
Of course, this is also being amplified by information warfare by opponents to the UK [4][5], as can be seen by the social media campaign against offshore wind farms in the Isle of Man [6].
Frankly, the UK needs to internalize Fiona Hill's [7] position and start cracking down on fifth columnists like Farage, Corbyn, and their acolytes.
[0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3r39el1ne0o
[1] - https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/26000069.rejection-200m-...
[2] - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/labour-versu...
[3] - https://fishingnews.co.uk/news/developer-pulls-out-of-east-o...
[4] - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/18/uk-politics...
[5] - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/social-media/article/iran-war-fa...
[6] - https://www.facebook.com/61588338835208/
[7] - https://xcancel.com/FrankRGardner/status/2027098560647348410
I mean offshore wind, not onshore. Thankfully most of the new ones are being built in England - check https://openinframap.org/#7.05/53.375/3.069, and these aren't curtailed.
But it was incredibly dumb to build many GW of offshore wind in Scotland when the grid was already over capacity.
> But it was incredibly dumb to build many GW of offshore wind in Scotland when the grid was already over capacity.
Isn't it equally dumb to continue to bet the entire country's economy on a tiny little bit of England (and then shame the other regions as unproductive layabouts when they don't produce as much tax revenue)? Energy production is not the only, nor even the biggest imbalance in UK resources. Maybe people and businesses should go where the energy is instead of waiting for it to come to them.
Even offshore ones face persistent opposition [0].
Frankly, opposition to either onshore or offshore wind farms is dumb and is clearly being weaponized by opponents of the UK.
> But it was incredibly dumb to build many GW of offshore wind in Scotland when the grid was already over capacity
Overcapacity is a good problem to have from a NatSec perspective (as is seen with Chinese and Indian solar).
Also, it's the Scottish Government that has been backing offshore wind farm development for almost a decade [1].
Similar initiatives could have been done in England, but face persistent issues at the local level due to weaponized opposition.
[0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74vj881090o
[1] - https://www.gov.scot/policies/marine-renewable-energy/offsho...
I don't quite understand. The opposition can't be that insurmountable for offshore wind off England coast (instead of Scotland) given 700 giant offshore turbines are being built as we speak off the English coast. Including the world's largest windfarm (Hornsea 3).
Look at the timeline of when Hornsea 3 and these projects were initiated - most of these projects broke ground 10 to 15 years ago.
The issue is the next generation of offshore wind projects in England is up in the air. This was why Hornsea 4 [0] was cancelled by Ørsted, how the Isle of Man has mobilized against the Mooir Vannin project [1] despite it having the potential to help Liverpool and Manchester, and the Shetland's project being cancelled due to the fishing lobby [2].
What is under construction today doesn't matter because those projects started a decade ago. What matters is whether new projects are being allowed or blocked.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/offsho...
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74vj881090o
[2] - https://fishingnews.co.uk/news/developer-pulls-out-of-east-o...
We have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. The politicians obsess over net-zero at the expense of dealing with the issues affecting most people.
What if a happy byproduct of pushing for net zero is more investment in renewables, and decoupling the electricity price from gas?
Part of the reason why we have high electricity costs (here in the UK) is that we peg the price to gas generation, on the face of it people complain about that but the higher price allows investments in renewables to make sense on an RoI PoV, effectively it's a subsidy to build out renewables at a higher rate than would otherwise be the case.
Electricity prices are high in the UK but there is a net benefit to it at least some ways, as always the devil is in the details, all the details.
Isn't that just an excuse to justify the scam? Texas has very low electricity prices and at the same time a growing share of renewables.
Texas has some different choices in their electricity markets but they use the same pay-as-clear marginal pricing system that the above poster thinks is a secret UK plan to subsidise renewables. In reality it is the standard way to set the market price of commodities.
Texas famously had massive spikes in electricty prices and a near failure of the grid because of their electricity market structure, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
Been a while since I looked at a map but I don't remember us invading Texas and annexing them as part of His Majesties territories...
Well it kinda was, until the locals got uppity and threw their tea in the harbour.
Texas wasn't part of the US at that time.
It was annexed in the mid-19th century, they abused the Yorkshire Gold way before that.
That's why I said kinda. Texas is part of the United States. The United States was the group that got uppity.
If 2 European powers had a war over a territory that is now part of a third country we would still describe the war as being between the 2 original countries. Even if other territories that weren't part of those nations at the time now are.
But yes, on the other hand we are talking specifically about Texas so maybe you're right.
On the 3rd hand the chance to get superior with the colonies should never be passed up.
That would be wonderful. But that hasn't happened yet, so i'll point out that whatever our current energy strategy is, it's failing miserably and wrecking the economy. For some reason other countries seem to have it figured out much better, so forgive me for not falling over in excitement over the fact that some war in the middle east is costing us a billion less then it might have.
Other countries are not likely spending much less on the transition, it's just that they're paying for it more in tax and less in the electricity bill. The UK's strategy here basically means there's now a huge amount of investment in renewables even without government subsidies. And the nature of renewables and relying on gas in the meantime (which has pretty much always been setting the price of electricity, it's just gotten even more expensive recently) means that there's a relatively more painful period of investment before you get to the cost benefits of a nearly entirely renewable grid.
Between Brexit and the aging population, I don't think joining the rest of the world in poisoning the atmosphere for the future faster is going to improve the UK's situation. There are much, much bigger fish to fry than energy policy for improvement-per-unit-effort.
The UK relies heavily on tourism. Tourism is disrupted by global instability. Climate change and fossil-fuel-catalyzed wars cultivate global instability. And the UK doesn't have the land or people to compete on the global stage in manufacturing exports (not that they do bad work, just that the scale doesn't exactly pan out. Not unless people are really keen on telling the tale of two cities again).
Best policy is likely to focus on domestic affairs (how to keep the country stable and solvent as the population shifts towards more and more retirees) and maybe look into rejoining that massive free-trade sector right down the block that the country so short-sightedly left a short time ago, since it'd really open up the tourism and trade markets.
You seem to make the same comments in every thread about renewable energy regardless of what's actually happening.
Nice to see you again. Yeah, i feel it's a political thing where green initiatives are being pushed against the interest and benefit of voters. The benefits are continually overhyped and frankly in the UK we are seeing none of them. I actually quite like the idea of renewables and don't entirely understand Trumps pathological hatred of them, but i don't think politicians hamstringing our economy to win green points with their pals is a good thing. Also what's the plan here? Fall years behind the rest of the world while we switch over and then expect to magically catch up somehow?
We have policies that are good in principal but when they interact with other policy become unworkable for a reasonable cost. But then you focus on one individual area of policy rather than the system as a whole.
Also, in my experience the green initiatives generally have terrible publicity and these kind of articles are just pointing out some positives in a sea of negatives. What we endlessly miss is that the British public generally wants Co2 reduced and have got that.
The "political thing" is the oil industry working hard to make you feel like going renewable is a "political thing". It's a matter of life-or-death for them that you believe their lies.
If you like the idea of renewables take some time to understand the economics instead of spouting the same tired lies.
They don't "hamstring the economy". Nor will adopting them cause you to "fall behind". The "rest of the world" is rapidly adopting renewables.
So cleaner air, more efficient buildings etc is against the interests and benefits on the voters>
> We have some of the highest electricity prices in the world.
Current price −£24.86/MWh (yes you get paid to use it)
Octopus fixed tariff day rates are currently 33.15 p/kWh, or £332/MWh, which is a better representative number for what people are actually paying.
But timeshift seems to be increasingly important.
24.67 pence per kWh, the Energy price cap (fixed till 30 June 2026) is a better representative number for what people are actually paying.
If you fixed at 33p, sucks to be you, my electricity has been free to negative all day.
Turns out I'm actually on 20p from a fix from last year, I was just grabbing some representative numbers off the website. Also this discussion has reminded me to put in a meter reading.
> my electricity has been free to negative all day
Like a gambler who only talks about their wins, people on these smart energy plans on the few days it goes very cheap only seem to pipe up with the current low unit price, and never mention their longer-term moving-average unit price...
> never mention their longer-term moving-average unit price
17.1p (last 6 months) no battery, no timeshifting
Very impressive! My smart meter install is happening next month. Can't wait to save 9p/kWh!
Honestly: jog on.
You can see the transition happening. Right now.
Does this cancel out the high energy prices people in the UK have been paying for the past decade+? Part of the reason the bills are high is because they subsidise the installation of renewable generation.
In hindsight it was quite prescient to be installing renewables wasn't it.
It might have been better to lump some of those costs on gas rather than electricity. Polluter pays and all that.
Sounds like that was a good idea, then? Not sure why you perceive this as some sort of gotcha or an axe to grind.
Yes, building infrastructure costs money. Where's the problem?
> Part of the reason bills are high is because they subsidise the installation of renewable generation.
Yeah citation definitely needed. UK electricity prices are high because we are highly dependent on imported gas.
Yes. Obviously it does.
Is it obvious? Do you have the figures? One month of £1bn savings vs what cost over the last 20 years?
I support the roll out of renewables. I worked for a renewable energy company in the UK.
I just think a lot of consumers (industry and residential) have had to pay a very high price to get to the current situation. And lots of foreign private and other institutional (the Crown) organisations have benefitted most from this fast but expensive transition.