Re: energy in UK

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.
It was sort of OK until the war in Ukraine started and Russian gas was plentiful in Europe. We were pretty much screwed from that point because we had almost no long term gas storage capacity with Rough closed down (it was deliberately taken offline to save on maintenance costs).
https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/knowledgecentre/business/business/gas_price_spike/
The price paid for wholesale electricity in the UK is determined by the cost of generating the most expensive component needed to match demand (so that they can make a profit). This is typically a fast response gas turbine and all suppliers get paid in proportion to that high price.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/02/25/its-time-to-change-uk-energy-pricing/
The whole thing is rigged by Ofgem (the energy regulator) for the benefit of the electricity producers and against their customers.
At night the spot price for electricity can spike negative so that UK battery farms like to put insanely big substations onto their batteries to game the system (and so get paid handsomely for accepting power). This does nothing for network stability.

The UK has an insane imbalance between production of power in the North and consumption of power in London and the South East. The main cables running N-S are routinely overloaded during daytime during winter.

 Why is NEW generation not brought on-line closer to the demand?

Engineers have been warning about the problem for about 3 decades.
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/in-depth/generation-gap/

Is this a NiMBY issue?  Or, a consequence of real-estate valuations?

Partly a factor is that land prices are much lower in the north but also it is a lot more windy. A Nimby in the south is worth 10 in the north.
One option is to install large BESS systems near to the windfarms and also near the major city loads. That way power can be moved overnight to where it will be needed in the daytime. Only snag is that it is way more profitable to build them in the north where land is so much cheaper.
UK infrastructure configuration is determined by speculators.

Or, just a resistance to solving a problem (which then means you can't
CLAIM to be the one who WILL solve it -- if elected to do so)?

UK national infrastructure has been privatised and robbed blind by vulture capitalists since the 1980's. It isn't just electricity that is problematic London's water supply was in dire danger of going bust too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66051555
It is ultimately all about very clever financial engineering to load the balance sheet with debt and pay handsome dividends to foreign owners.
Penny wise and pound foolish for the the UK.
--
Martin Brown