"Analysts told the BBC that local distributors and suppliers are moving charges which were once part of a consumer's unit price for energy (which now has a tight upper limit on it) over to their standing charge. They are also increasing standing charges to the maximum level for each region, which means a big jump for some places."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60878314
- Andy.
As is well known, the wind and sun are not guaranteed to be there 24/7, which is why we need a prime mover for energy generation, unless we switch off completely from electricity and gas use and keep warm by burning trees instead, or have it so that only the rich can afford to use it.
The fact is; coal was never given an even playing field from the outset of this green nonsense - so how could it ever compete effectively against artificially cheap wind?
it is amusing to note that some of the later wind farms, where there is an agreed strike price per unit, rather than a fixed subsidy paid per kWhr over ther market rate, that now the strike price is below the wholesale market rate the wind farms are actually getting less money in than they would selling on the open market - but of course it cuts both ways- when they started generating they were in effect being paid over the odds, and a guaranteed income helps free up the private investors cash. (link to that) (and as reported in the evening standard)
However, I agree the majority of the early contracts were arranged as simple subsidies, and we will be paying the more recent of those until the mid 2030s. However I think we have to look at that as more like R & D investment, as it has paid to develop the multi-megawatt turbines we have today, and that would not have been done without someone buying the little ones first.
The fact that anyone can say 'Gigawatt wind farm" without anyone falling off their perch, and with a development time so short, is a remarkable engineering achievement.
so much for looking forward 15 years, looking back consider that the UK generation stats show no wind generation worth counting in the national figures before 2006. link here Mind you at that point more electricity was still being generated by coal than by gas. It's not that surprising it needed some incentive. However, I agree totally that now it can safely be wound back. We just need to do the same for tidal and a few other things.
Mike
its the green agenda that has caused this
I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion. It's the wholesale gas price that's behind the recent increases - partly as a long term increase in demand as parts of the world continue to modernise, exacerbated by sharply increasing demand after the world economy picked up after covid lockdowns, and partly due to our friends in Moscow mysteriously throttling back supplies for several months for reasons which are now very apparent, plus all the current uncertainty and interruption of supply that war & sanctions always bring.
It's all made worse for consumers as our electricity "market" arrangement means that all generators are in general free to charge whatever the market will stand - making huge profits where prices significantly exceed their costs. As Mike pointed out the "subsidy" system of having a fixed guaranteed strike price (that I think all recent wind farms, as well as new nuclear) work to - has meant wind generators paying back large amounts rather than receiving anything - this disappointment of the system is that that money doesn't directly go to keeping prices low for consumers.
- Andy.
"I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion"
Is it not part of the Green agenda to stop fossil fuel use for our energy based on their belief that CO2 plant food is evil. We could be totally self sufficient with our own energy should we choose to, while we transition to nuclear. No need for wind, battery or solar.
There ain’t no going back.
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.
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.
I do wish these threads didn't magically jump between Forums without leaving a trace behind of where they've gone to - makes finding them again much more difficult than it need be :-(
anyhow...
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
Yes, the last week or so has been part of the "hard 20%" - no argument there. But I don't see that as a good reason to burn gas (or anything else for that matter) unnecessarily for the other 80% of the time. The more we generate from wind (and solar, tidal, hydro and bio) the less gas we use, the less dependent we are on imports.
Bills have just increasing by 54% simply due to the increased wholesale cost of gas.
I agree that changes in policy can help, but I gather that UK North Sea gas can only supply about 40% of our needs at the moment - with another 40% imported from Norway and the remaining 20% comes as LNG by ship from further away. UK coal production is non-existent. Nuclear takes decades to build. How can we hope to be self-sufficient in even the medium term without renewables?
- Andy.
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