There speaks a Townie ;-)  A lot of perfectly good food just grows, chickens lay eggs in the back garden etc, what you pay for has more to do with where you live. 
And rather like the fruit on the trees, some energy just arrives for free, but you need to be organized enough to know when to catch it.
M.

mapj1 said:

You can't help feeling an extension  lead direct from France into Holland would be a better bet

Isn't that the European grid?

But but that's a choice. Do we eat chicken or porridge. 

We all need energy to cook with. That we can't control.

The gridwatch templar shows that we need a minimum base 24 hour a day generation capacity of 25 GW . At present we only have 5 GW of nuclear so all the missing 20GW has to be generated by either wind, solar, hydro, tidal or by some other planetary physical means.

If none of these green energies is available then only option is top up from power stations that run on hydrocarbon fuels such as gas, oil or coal/wood. 

Natgrid naturally will go for the most economical source and leave the government to decide which alternative fuel sources should be promoted and financed in the future.

My feeling is that to protect foreign currency the best option is 20 GW of mini nuclear, assisted by coal which we have plenty of, as a backup.