rwmjBritain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
> Britain paying highest electricity prices in the world for second year running
> Ed Miliband’s net zero targets are facing fresh scrutiny after Britain was found to be paying the highest electricity prices in the developed world.
> New data published on Tuesday showed the price paid by UK industry for power was 63pc higher than in France and 27pc higher than in Germany.
> Britain is also the second-most expensive country in the world for household electricity, with billpayers paying twice as much as those in the US.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/britain-paying-highest-e...
Yes. But these things can be orthogonal. Or actually brcause gas is expensive.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro
The price for wholesale electricity is set by a bidding process, with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce a unit of electricity.
Once built, the cost of generating power from renewables is very low, so these typically come in with the cheapest bid. Nuclear might come next.
Gas generators often have the highest costs, because they have to buy gas to burn, as well as paying a "carbon price" - a charge for emissions.
The wholesale cost is set by the last unit of electricity needed to meet demand from consumers. This means that even if gas only generates 1% of power at a given time, gas will still set the wholesale price.
California is a great example; highest electricity prices in the US (not counting Hawaii, which makes sense) despite significant hydro and fantastic solar capacity. In the last few years California runs 100% renewable on many days (and growing) every year.
Economics 101: prices are not set by what goods cost to create + markup. Prices are set by how much people are willing to pay.
Why is it "people are willing to pay" and not "corporations are brazen enough to charge"? These utilities are necessities and relatively few people have access to cheaper alternatives to them.
Because, under usual circumstances, self-interested corporations compete against each other to get as close to what people are willing to pay for energy as possible.
> In the last few years California runs 100% renewable on many days (and growing) every year.
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...
According to the official tracker (https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/clean-energy-serving-... and elsewhere) there were 279 days in 2025 where California was on 100% renewable for _some_ time during the day (could be hours, could be minutes at mid-day).
In total hours equivalent of 77.3 full days over 2025.
I've read this before and I don't understand how this doesn't become/is untenable.
Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
Also, this would mean that in order to really bring the price down, gas needs to be taken out as a source. But gas is typically the source that balances the grid because its output can be changed quickly. So price wise, you might get a drop but you would lose your ability to react quickly to fluctuations in demand
Yes, and I think that’s actually intentional, they’re rewarding renewables way over the odds without needing to give politically controversial benefits. The rewards are just an inherent result of the existing system. This is why renewables are growing rapidly in the uk.
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.
> Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
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.
> Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
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.
Sure, but those same free markets will happily see those expensive producers go out of business. In the electricity scenario, that would mean blackouts.
If you triple the price, you don't have a new gas plant appear out of thin air. And the result won't really be lower consumption either, because most people would have fixed rate contracts (not in the UK so don't know specifically, but this is very common elsewhere)
> Or actually brcause gas is expensive.
Gas in the UK is expensive because the Tories spent decades selling off the storage so developers could turn them into real estate. This continued well into the 2000's when, for example the lettuce (Truss) closed the Rough storage facility in 2017.
Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation. Another one of the Tory's great ideas. The UK privitisation model is designed to generate profit. Norway made a different choice. Equinor is majority state-owned, and Norwegian extraction operates within a framework designed to capture resource rents for public benefit. Britain privatised its way out of that option decades ago in the Thatcher-era and has never seriously revisited it.
Analysis from the University of Oxford[1] found that maximising oil and gas extraction from the North Sea would only save households £16 to £82 per year – and this would rely on tax revenues collected being distributed to households to offset their energy bills.
Dr Anupam Sen, co-author of the analysis, said the idea that “draining” the North Sea would make the UK more energy secure and significantly cut household bills is “sheer fantasy”. “We show that regardless of the remaining lifetime of North Sea oil and gas, a ‘drill baby drill’ approach to extraction would actually cost households more money versus continuing on our path to clean energy.”
The authors stress that savings gained from the clean energy transition are recurring annual reductions in bills which would continue indefinitely, whereas North Sea oil and gas are finite resources that would run out around 2040.
[1] https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/drill-baby-drill-appro...
“Drill baby drill” approach to North Sea would cost households more than a fully renewable UK, finds Oxford analysis
A UK powered fully by renewable energy could save all households up to £441 a year on their energy bills, according to a new Oxford Smith School analysis. In comparison, maximising oil & gas extraction from the North Sea would save households a modest £16 - £82 per year - and only if the tax revenues collected were distributed to households to offset their energy bills, the authors say.
Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy.
> Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy.
I will give credit to the person who got there before me. :)
Smoothing out price volatility is a big one.
But also it gives you options:
You can buy it "today" when its cheap and store it for when you need it (e.g. winter months).
You can also trade on that basis too. For example you can make a future-dated commitment to buy gas (knowing you have the storage available to take delivery). But if the situation changes and you later find you don't need it, you can sell that contract to someone else (or you can still take delivery and re-sell it). But you can't do any of that without having the ability to take delivery, because the person who sold you that future-dated contract will want both your money and to get the gas they sold you off their hands.
The UK (and Europe) could produce much more gas and consequently control prices if they wanted. It is easy to always blame the previous government(s) but the current situation is policy across Western Europe.
It takes time though and it's hard to anticipate geopolitical shocks like the war in Ukraine and Iran.
No, this has nothing to do with either. It is policy in the UK and EU not to produce gas on environmental and decarbonisation grounds, and so in fact high priced are policy.
> Iran
To be fair, I think you would be hard pushed to find anyone outside Israel who seriously thought Iran would ever be on the cards.
Netanyahu dedicated 40 years of his life going to various US presidents trying to get their buy-in. The US presidents all clearly listened to what their advisors had to say regarding Hormuz etc. and said "Thanks, but no thanks" to Netanyahu. Then Trump came along who was ready to over-rule his advisors and surrounded himself with yes-men in his cabinet.
I'm not being political here. A lot of it is public, for example just go to YouTube and look up the decades of videos of Netanyahu visiting the UN or US repeating the same line about "Iran being weeks away from a bomb", almost word-for-word for the last 40 years.
Exactly, and the Tories banned onshore wind, and refused to really invest in offshore wind. We've got the North Sea and its perfect for wind farms we should have had for decades
The current government is banning wind turbines factories and billions of Pounds in investments because "China". It is too easy to blame the previous government(s) when the current one has no strategic thinking or plan, either.
The study you have linked is completely wrong.
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. 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.
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.
Yeah I'm in the UK and for electricity, I'm on the green Octopus Agile tariff, which tracks the wholesale price updating every 30 mins. Given the abundant green energy today, and peak times between 3-7pm, right this second I'm paying £0.02/kWh, but at 6pm, I'll be charged £0.40/kWh. In the coming months with gas supply reduced, and consumer demand steady, it will have a knock on impact to me given it tracks wholesale cost so I'll have to consider moving off the tariff given I'll be paying more overall.
Electricity pricing in the UK is dictated largely by the price of Gas. This is a good video that goes into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEnFmrgEbWo
How Britain broke its electrical grid (and how to fix it)
It’s always the same talking points we heard five to ten years ago about Germany. This obsession with short term narratives is the problem with people like you.
I'm sure there's an (un)healthy dose of degrowth to let them hit that 90% number too.
and still somehow pay tons for "cheap" green electricity
Somehow? It’s a well established and publicised fact that it’s due to the price of gas. It’s so well established that anyone posting a comment here about the high price of electricity without mentioning it has an ulterior motive.
So who's working on fixing it? It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature. Meanwhile you have folks seeing these three things together:
- England is 90% renewables
- Renewables are a really cheap source of energy.
- England has very high energy prices.
And the obvious conclusion is that someone is lying. It's eroding support for renewables among those that don't have time to investigate how or why the spot price of gas sets the overall energy price.
My understanding is that legislation is in the works to fix that. But we’ll see.
Yesterday it was announced that a trial would take place so that regions near wind farms can receive free energy from them in periods of curtailment.
>It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature.
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 (synthesised) stored gas as the power source of last resort on cold, windless nights after batteries and pumped storage have been depleted.
It's also widely misunderstood. Just because the spot price of electricity is set by the price of gas doesn’t mean the consumer pays that price for all of their electricity.
A lot of wind and solar are on Contracts for Difference. That means when market prices go above the agreed level, the generator pays the difference back through the scheme, which reduces supplier costs rather than the generator simply keeping the whole windfall.
This is particularly relevant when e.g. the price of gas goes way up due to the Iran war, it doesn't mean that the consumer ends up paying more for the energy from wind
Stop seeing this through the eyes of a consumer. On a macro scale, your country is not handing hundreds of millions of pounds a day over to other countries. Now imagine if it still was. You'd be even worse off.
These titles are misleading, they always omit the rest of the grid and the final carbon footprint.
In March, the UK emitted 161g CO2/kWh.
France did 6 times less CO2/kWh with 2x less renewables !
France has much more nuclear. You can argue that is better but even if you agree it would take decades to get there.
The title may be misleading, but IMO not for the reasons you mentioned. "90%" is based on generation right now, live. On the site from the post you can see that for the last day (24h) renewable generation was 66%, for the last week 46%, for the last year 42%. So it's nowhere near 90% renewable in general, but it is 90% at the moment (there's sunlight and good wind). Emissions on the website from the post are lower than on the website you linked - 107 g/kWh for the week, 124 for the year - but I don't know why that is.