Re: energy in UK

On 4/26/2025 2:51 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 25/04/2025 18:44, Don Y wrote:

On 4/25/2025 9:41 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

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

>
I don't understand "The wholesale cost is set by the last unit of
electricity needed to meet demand from consumers".  Surely, this isn't
the ACTUAL cost but, rather, the PRICE.  Is there some silly policy
that is creating this misrepresentation?

 It is the amount you have to pay the last (most expensive) fast gas turbine to come online to meet demand.

Yes, but the electricity consumed (sold) prior to that was produced
at a LOWER cost.  Does EVERYONE suddenly pay more (for electricity
already made available at a lower cost) when the utility has to draw
on rapid response resources?

And yes all the other suppliers of electricity get that final top whack price for their electricity too.
 The UK market is rigged in favour of the producers of electricity. It makes green energy Very profitable here since there is no fuel cost once it is installed. Capital investment is huge but running costs low.

I think that favoring the producer is common in capitalist societies.
One can argue that if they don't make a profit, they won't engage in the
activity.  Then what?

And, why is there no "Domestic" price for the UK entry?  Along with
other "missing" data in the first graph?

 I don't understand your question. UK is fourth line down 31.2p domestic and 29.6 industrial (the latter being a huge outlier cf EU competitors).
Only the UK punishes its industrial base in such a manner.

The rendering of the chart on my machine shows no numeric associated with
the "Domestic" entries for Ireland, UK, Italy, Austria, Finland, Sweden and
Greece.  It shows no numeric for the Industrial entries for Ireland, Italy,
Austria, Spain, Portugal and Luxembourg.  Though there are scaled bars
for each of these.
Perhaps a browser issue...

It looks like Domestic (residential/consumer?) costs are considerably
higher than Industrial (?)

 More accurately most sensible countries allow their big industrial users to buy electricity at a price related to the total cost of production. UK pricing anomaly stems from the dash for gas tightly coupling electricity prices here to the spot wholesale price on the gas market. It used to be smoothed out by having bulk storage at Rough (but they closed that). It made sense to some bean counters at the time.
 Ukraine war and Russia turning the gas taps off really set the cat among the pigeons see the second price vs time graph. The only reason that it didn't go even higher was government intervention. Obtaining enough gas during the first winter was touch and go. Lucky it was a very mild winter.

So, is all heat produced by electricity?