Re: energy in UK

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.
--
Martin Brown