More increases in electricity bills?

We could be totally self sufficient with our own energy

Not using gas we couldn't - North Sea production has been in decline for years and we're long been nett importers. Even if we could produce sufficient gas for our own needs with the current 'free market' setup we'd still have to pay global market prices for the gas so the cost of generation would still be high. Likewise all our easy coal was taken out of the ground a generation or more ago, even if we had the working pits it wouldn't be ecomonic compared with imported open cast stuff. Oil for electricty generation would be a non-starter economically. All of our own sources of fossil fuels are in decline in any event, at best we'd be just delaying inevitable and leave the same problem for the next generation.

On the other hand we can use zero-fuel-cost renewables - new off-shore wind was coming in cheaper overall than gas even before the price increases. So I reckon use that to displace gas whereever we can in the medium term - which minimises our gas consumption while retaining generation capacity for the periods of low wind, Better building insulation can also gut gas demand for space heating, so a far better chance of being self-reliant on gas for a while if we had to. We have the technology now without storage to get perhaps 80% of our electricity from renewables - just by scaling up what we already do. The remaining 20% would be much harder of course, needing much cleverer demand managemet as well as a lot of storage, but still possible I feed.

    - Andy.

And how much energy was produced last week by wind?

3% and you're suggesting we need more turbines!

25% of our energy bills go to unreliables.

We can be self sufficient with the right policies in place.

The thing is; the cost reduction of all this cheap wind energy is not being reflected in cheaper bills for the consumer, whose bills have been front-loaded with subsidies, and is it really sensible to cease diversity of supply in an uncertain world? One only has to look at how dependent many systems vital to a successfully functioning society now rely upon the internet for example. How is it sensible to only have a single source of energy to each home/business in the land, the failure of which would effectively paralyze society, from traffic control to moving money around the world.

I remember our neighbors coming round to boil a kettle on our gas cooker during the 70s power cuts - all of their cooking and other facilities were all-electric. In a all-electric world, once the power goes off, so does everything else.

So, the existing grid has come close to brown-outs and black-outs because of the lack of sufficient generating capacity, is it the plan to reduce demand by pricing out the majority? Financially penalise the heaviest industrial users and drive them overseas so they can sell their products back to us and we are left with a clear green conscience?

And at a time when we are being urged to use less, we have the introduction into our consumer units of parasitic devices which are 'on' 24/7 looking for arcs and not sparks - good luck with that. Scale the number of these up - say 5 in of each 10 way box across some 25 million or more homes and other premises and just how is it helping with reducing demand at the time of an acute energy crisis?

It makes one wonder if there is any joined-up thinking going on at all.

whjohnson said:

It makes one wonder if there is any joined-up thinking going on at all

There is a lot of joined-up thinking going on, but less of it is in evidence in some of the contributions to this discussion on this forum.

Try William Nordhaus's The Climate Casino (Yale U.P, 2013) for estimates of how much global GDP it will cost to wean ourselves off energy production which contributes to the accumulation of greenhouse gases. (Spoiler: not much.) Nordhaus's work is the most believable on this point. It gained him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. 

whjohnson said:

It makes one wonder if there is any joined-up thinking going on at all

There is a lot of joined-up thinking going on, but less of it is in evidence in some of the contributions to this discussion on this forum.

Try William Nordhaus's The Climate Casino (Yale U.P, 2013) for estimates of how much global GDP it will cost to wean ourselves off energy production which contributes to the accumulation of greenhouse gases. (Spoiler: not much.) Nordhaus's work is the most believable on this point. It gained him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.