Re: energy in UK

On 26/04/2025 11:17, Don Y wrote:

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.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro
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It is titled
"If the UK has more renewable energy, why aren't bills coming down?"

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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?

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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?

The box shifting middlemen who sit between true electricity producers and the consumers have to pay more. For them to stay in business they have to make a profit and the price they pay for wholesale electricity is determined by the most expensive component at any given time.
Consumers can choose to be on a variable tariff that tracks gas price but most lock their price in midsummer to a fixed term contract. Likewise for businesses. After Ukraine invasion that became impossible and almost everyone was on spot prices - better deals have come back.
The internal market between electricity "producers" counting battery storage into the mix can actually spike negative! The algorithms used are unstable and are routinely gamed by the big players.
https://www.nextenergysolarfund.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/NextEnergy-Capital-Insights-Negative-Power-Prices-GB-Wholesale-Energy-Market-Sept-2024.pdf
That is a fairly favourable review. Some of it is justified but a lot of it is paper profit at the expense of consumers and UK business.

 

And yes all the other suppliers of electricity get that final top whack price for their electricity too.
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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?

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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...

Weird. Old IE wouldn't show any diagrams at all. Opera & Edge was fine.

 

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

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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.
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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?

No. Most domestic space and water heating is mains gas (which obviously is also tightly coupled to the wholesale gas price). The only people using electricity for heating either have a resistive electric fire to heat a single room they live in (quite rare now) or heat pump based CH.
Our hot water has a resistive immersion heater as backup to oil boiler (mains gas isn't available where I live) even though several of the UK's highest pressure gas pipelines runs nearby.
--
Martin Brown