Re: energy in UK

On Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:41:58 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 15/04/2025 21:04, Martin Brown wrote:

On 15/04/2025 01:43, Don Y wrote:

On 4/14/2025 3:58 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 13/04/2025 06:23, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 13/04/2025 4:16 am, john larkin wrote:

>
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/10/uk_ai_energy_council_meets/

>
They are on another planet. UK energy prices are sky high to the
extent that making steel profitable here is completely impossible.

>
What's "sky high"?  And, are residential and commercial/industrial
rates significantly different?

 
Yes and in complicated ways. Residential tariffs are capped, ordinary
businesses are not but a handful of ultimate heavy use load balancing
centres get preferential rates on condition that they can get no
electricity at all. Think aluminium and fertiliser plants and choralkali
electrolysis. (I think the last aluminium plant in England has now shut)
 
Increasingly the winter peak load in the UK is balanced by paying big
heavy industrial users to shut down or go to a standby condition! There
are even schemes to reward home users not to use power at peak times.
 
Typical electricity prices in the UK are tightly coupled to the spot
price of natural gas in a totally crazy pricing structure. Electricity
in the UK is 2x the price on mainland Europe and 4x that in the US.

>
I know it is bad form to follow up your own post but my description
above is actually not as bad as it really is. The situation for most UK
business users is in fact considerably worse than I believed to be true.
>
BBC Verify researchers did a thing recently on global electricity prices
and UK Green Energy. Electricity for most British industry is insanely
expensive (more so than I had thought). Compares a range of countries.
>
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro
>
It is titled
"If the UK has more renewable energy, why aren't bills coming down?"
>
Only a handful of preferred dumpable load balancing industrial users get
the tariff that I described most UK heavy power users are robbed blind!
No wonder Tata and now the Chinese want to close Scunthorpre steelworks.

For the record, the rate I pay in the Boston area is 16.3 US pennies
per kwh.  The UKP is 1.33 USD, so that translates to 12.3 pence per
kwh.

Small industrial users near Boston pay slightly more, 20.14 US pennies
per kwh.  Larger users pay less, maybe 10 US pennies.

Joe