rwmjBritain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
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.