The issue though is that the UK spends something along the lines of £10-25bn (depending how you count subsidies) a year on renewable. Something like £10bn in direct subsidies via CfD and RO, then another ~£1.5-2bn on curtailment (paying wind farms to turn off), ~£3bn in balancing market costs, and £6bn on transmission upgrade costs (passed back to consumers/businesses) to upgrade transmission for nearly always renewable projects. There's actually a lot of others I think you could attribute to renewables but I could spend all day writing about this.
My guess is that £20bn/year is a fair cost overall in subsidy payments. This is clearly not offset by natural gas fuel savings even with elevated prices.
The UK IMO made a couple of critical mistakes. Firstly, far too much offshore wind is in Scotland when it should have been closer to population centres in England. A few factors for this but the issue is planning is devolved to Scotland (so they have every incentive to approve as many) but energy subsidies are set by Westminster. By the time UK central government realised this it was too late (or they didn't want to rock the cart for political reasons post/during Scottish independence referendum).
We're now having to pay £20-30bn+ to get Scottish wind generation down to England where it is needed (primarily through new 5 (!) 2GW HVDCs from Scotland to England). It would have been far far better just to... build those wind farms closer to England. This would have still required grid upgrades but far cheaper ones (bringing it 100-200km to population centres instead of all the way from Scotland, plus you still need to do the ones in England on top of that for the most part to get it from the HVDC landing sites to the population centres).
The second major issue is there is definitely massive diminishing returns from adding more renewables at this point. There's too many renewables on the grid a lot of the time, even if transmission was perfect - supply is outstripping demand. Instead of building more and more generation the subsidies should be redirected towards storage projects.
But overall, for the same £20bn a year you could have probably built 5 Hinckley Point C sized 3.2GW nuclear plants concurrently (assuming £4bn a year capex for 10 years). In 20 years you'd have probably 30GW of nuclear built, which should cover nearly all electricity demand in the UK in that time, with very limited transmission costs (existing nuclear plants have good grid connections and you build them close to them). And importantly, you would basically eliminate _any_ dependence on gas from the UK grid. Clearly nuclear has risks in project delivery, but at least it's reliable once built.
That's some pretty creative accounting to get to the 25bn mark. You also don't need to subsidise storage projects. They get built by market demand, as you can see by the amount being built and operated by energy trading firms who use them solely to buy power when the price is low and sell when high.
The planing issues were mostly due to the conservative party having a complete hate for onshore wind.
How? The issue is local NIMBYs [0], anti-industry environmentalists [1], and far left leaning groups [2] all attempt to obstruct wind farm expansion and make it difficult for moderates in Labour to actually execute.
Of course, this is also being amplified by information warfare by nation states [3][4].
Frankly, the UK needs to internalize Fiona Hill's [5] position and start cracking down on fifth columnists like Farage, Corbyn, and their acolytes.
I mean offshore wind, not onshore. Thankfully most of the new ones are being built in England - check https://openinframap.org/#7.05/53.375/3.069, and these aren't curtailed.
But it was incredibly dumb to build many GW of offshore wind in Scotland when the grid was already over capacity.
I don't quite understand. The opposition can't be that insurmountable for offshore wind off England coast (instead of Scotland) given 700 giant offshore turbines are being built as we speak off the English coast. Including the world's largest windfarm (Hornsea 3).
Europe seems to be responding well since the Ukraine war, the picture now is a lot more positive than in 2022. The UK has postionined itself well, even without the mass uptake of local generation/storage in it's domestic market.
Electricity prices in the UK are painful, and galling when set by the price of gas, but it’s worth remembering that this model and all this expense has bought a major asset that will only become more important and strategic.
The next milestones to hit are:
* A 10x increase in generation capacity
* A 100x increase in storage capacity
* A 1000x increase in seasonal storage capacity
* Electrification of heating
* Electrification of synfuels and synthetic chemical feedstocks
Full energy sovereignty is achievable within 10 years at wartime-spending levels. Probably 30 years otherwise.
Rehabilitation of nuclear is almost certainly required for the transition and a very good hedge / backstop regardless.
Yeah, we're (UK) only just at the "occasionally cheap 100% renewables" state, and it's maddeningly slow progress. But it seems like a lot of things are suddenly coming online, like battery storage, and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years. https://eandt.theiet.org/2026/04/02/ps12bn-plan-upgrade-scot...
The transition will probably be quite nonlinear: getting from zero to a few days a year of 100% renewables is about as much effort as going from a few days a year to most of the year.
I couldn't disagree more. I'm going to point to Gary Stevenson [1] for why. He could probably get to the point faster but here's the core premise: Europe responded to the energy shocks since 2020 by transferring the better part of a trillion euros to energy companies in the US and the Middle East, particularly for LNG.
Imagine where Europe might be if half a trillion euros was spent on renewables.
The core problem as he describes it is that European governments don't own these providers so it's a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the ultra-wealthy.
Back in the pandemic, Spain was one of the few countries that tackled the inflation shock in a better way with a windfall profits tax. Interestingly, Europe is talking about doing that now [2]. That would be smarter.
Energy prices disproportionately hurt the poor [3]. If the government owned or part-owned the energy (like Norway does) then you could offset that without burning cash to stick your head in the sand for a little bit longer.
And the reason Spain is so well insulated is because they have limited gas interconnection so they have a 'captive supplier' in Algerian gas. Algerian gas can basically only go to Spain, Morocco or the domestic Algerian market. They have some limited LNG export capacity (which is growing and will significantly change the price Spain pays longer term).
UK is legally required to set the price of electricity to whichever generator has the highest cost - which is natural gas. Its called marginal cost pricing.
It's worth thinking how this would work if it didn't work like this though? Nearly all 'commodity' markets clear this way.
If you switched to 'people get paid what they bid' it's almost certain the market would just converge back to this anyway - but with a lot more gaming and guesswork (wind guessing the gas marginal price to try and get the highest price).
That's how all commodity markets works. All of Europe runs on the same scheme.
Do you think the Saudi's price their $10 per barrel oil at $10? The average price? Median? Or marginal?
They price at at the marginal price.
In the UK what this means is that cheap production like renmewables and storage are incentivized to get built while the most expensive fossil production is shutting down.
Then at some point renewables start to become to marginal producer and prices crater. Which is already happening.
I believe that no governing party has attempted to fix this. Generally - this set up benefits the oil/gas lobby, so efforts to change it will butt heads with them. UK also trades energy with mainland Europe, which can add a complication with how prices are set.
When I was young they talked about a green revolution. Now with low solar panel costs, as well as batteries and inverters we really are living in a green revolution.
I'm in the UK and am currently being paid to use electricity.
My energy provider uses a tracker tariff which can change every half hour (it does have a maximum cap to prevent the issues seen in Texas). Prices are currently negative, so every kWh I use right now means the electricity company pays me.
Nuclear promised energy which was "too cheap to meter". But solar actually delivered.
If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?
It seems silly, but actually... it's driving useful behavior I suppose. Then again, maybe a good government would notice this and just fast track grid storage rather than distribute that work to all the citizens.
A lot of the value to homeowners is essentially arbitrage on the retail cost of electricity: when prices are high you're going to be paying a lot more to pull electricity from the grid than you would be paid to supply it, so you're better off using up the buffer yourself as opposed to paying for electricity from the grid.
> If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?
Yes, some people do this. There's even a startup built around the idea: https://www.axle.energy/
Sure you could. How much do you think they will pay you per kw? 1/10 what you paid them and they will charge you for using their infrastructure..at least in the US they do.
I don't think that would ever commonly be viable or at least not for a long time. EV's are a lot more than batteries and are proportionally stupidly expensive.
If the electricity net arbitrage was worth the degradation of the battery then .... companies would do it themselves and just build the batteries for cheaper at scale.
I believe Centrica did some research before the Iran war and found that if we were able to get gas for free, energy bills wouldn't fall and would actually rise over the next few years (because of the mix towards structurally high cost supply).
It says something that the people running the monopoly cash machine are asking questions about bankrupting their customers/ability to pay but politicians are shutting their eyes and pounding onto the accelerator. What a world.
We have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. The politicians obsess over net-zero at the expense of dealing with the issues affecting most people.
Part of the reason why we have high electricity costs (here in the UK) is that we peg the price to gas generation, on the face of it people complain about that but the higher price allows investments in renewables to make sense on an RoI PoV, effectively it's a subsidy to build out renewables at a higher rate than would otherwise be the case.
Electricity prices are high in the UK but there is a net benefit to it at least some ways, as always the devil is in the details, all the details.
Texas has some different choices in their electricity markets but they use the same pay-as-clear marginal pricing system that the above poster thinks is a secret UK plan to subsidise renewables. In reality it is the standard way to set the market price of commodities.
Texas famously had massive spikes in electricty prices and a near failure of the grid because of their electricity market structure, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
That would be wonderful. But that hasn't happened yet, so i'll point out that whatever our current energy strategy is, it's failing miserably and wrecking the economy. For some reason other countries seem to have it figured out much better, so forgive me for not falling over in excitement over the fact that some war in the middle east is costing us a billion less then it might have.
Other countries are not likely spending much less on the transition, it's just that they're paying for it more in tax and less in the electricity bill. The UK's strategy here basically means there's now a huge amount of investment in renewables even without government subsidies. And the nature of renewables and relying on gas in the meantime (which has pretty much always been setting the price of electricity, it's just gotten even more expensive recently) means that there's a relatively more painful period of investment before you get to the cost benefits of a nearly entirely renewable grid.
Between Brexit and the aging population, I don't think joining the rest of the world in poisoning the atmosphere for the future faster is going to improve the UK's situation. There are much, much bigger fish to fry than energy policy for improvement-per-unit-effort.
The UK relies heavily on tourism. Tourism is disrupted by global instability. Climate change and fossil-fuel-catalyzed wars cultivate global instability. And the UK doesn't have the land or people to compete on the global stage in manufacturing exports (not that they do bad work, just that the scale doesn't exactly pan out. Not unless people are really keen on telling the tale of two cities again).
Best policy is likely to focus on domestic affairs (how to keep the country stable and solvent as the population shifts towards more and more retirees) and maybe look into rejoining that massive free-trade sector right down the block that the country so short-sightedly left a short time ago, since it'd really open up the tourism and trade markets.
Nice to see you again. Yeah, i feel it's a political thing where green initiatives are being pushed against the interest and benefit of voters. The benefits are continually overhyped and frankly in the UK we are seeing none of them. I actually quite like the idea of renewables and don't entirely understand Trumps pathological hatred of them, but i don't think politicians hamstringing our economy to win green points with their pals is a good thing. Also what's the plan here? Fall years behind the rest of the world while we switch over and then expect to magically catch up somehow?
The "political thing" is the oil industry working hard to make you feel like going renewable is a "political thing". It's a matter of life-or-death for them.
If you like the idea of renewables take some time to understand the economics instead of spouting the same tired lies.
They don't "hamstring the economy". Nor will adopting them cause you to "fall behind". The "rest of the world" is rapidly adopting renewables.
> my electricity has been free to negative all day
Like a gambler who only talks about their wins, people on these smart energy plans on the few days it goes very cheap only seem to pipe up with the current low unit price, and never mention their longer-term moving-average unit price...
Does this cancel out the high energy prices people in the UK have been paying for the past decade+? Part of the reason the bills are high is because they subsidise the installation of renewable generation.
The issue though is that the UK spends something along the lines of £10-25bn (depending how you count subsidies) a year on renewable. Something like £10bn in direct subsidies via CfD and RO, then another ~£1.5-2bn on curtailment (paying wind farms to turn off), ~£3bn in balancing market costs, and £6bn on transmission upgrade costs (passed back to consumers/businesses) to upgrade transmission for nearly always renewable projects. There's actually a lot of others I think you could attribute to renewables but I could spend all day writing about this.
My guess is that £20bn/year is a fair cost overall in subsidy payments. This is clearly not offset by natural gas fuel savings even with elevated prices.
The UK IMO made a couple of critical mistakes. Firstly, far too much offshore wind is in Scotland when it should have been closer to population centres in England. A few factors for this but the issue is planning is devolved to Scotland (so they have every incentive to approve as many) but energy subsidies are set by Westminster. By the time UK central government realised this it was too late (or they didn't want to rock the cart for political reasons post/during Scottish independence referendum).
We're now having to pay £20-30bn+ to get Scottish wind generation down to England where it is needed (primarily through new 5 (!) 2GW HVDCs from Scotland to England). It would have been far far better just to... build those wind farms closer to England. This would have still required grid upgrades but far cheaper ones (bringing it 100-200km to population centres instead of all the way from Scotland, plus you still need to do the ones in England on top of that for the most part to get it from the HVDC landing sites to the population centres).
The second major issue is there is definitely massive diminishing returns from adding more renewables at this point. There's too many renewables on the grid a lot of the time, even if transmission was perfect - supply is outstripping demand. Instead of building more and more generation the subsidies should be redirected towards storage projects.
But overall, for the same £20bn a year you could have probably built 5 Hinckley Point C sized 3.2GW nuclear plants concurrently (assuming £4bn a year capex for 10 years). In 20 years you'd have probably 30GW of nuclear built, which should cover nearly all electricity demand in the UK in that time, with very limited transmission costs (existing nuclear plants have good grid connections and you build them close to them). And importantly, you would basically eliminate _any_ dependence on gas from the UK grid. Clearly nuclear has risks in project delivery, but at least it's reliable once built.
That's some pretty creative accounting to get to the 25bn mark. You also don't need to subsidise storage projects. They get built by market demand, as you can see by the amount being built and operated by energy trading firms who use them solely to buy power when the price is low and sell when high.
The planing issues were mostly due to the conservative party having a complete hate for onshore wind.
Why replace oil dependency with uranium dependency (presumably from Russia)? Costs are not the only consideration.
> build those wind farms closer to England
How? The issue is local NIMBYs [0], anti-industry environmentalists [1], and far left leaning groups [2] all attempt to obstruct wind farm expansion and make it difficult for moderates in Labour to actually execute.
Of course, this is also being amplified by information warfare by nation states [3][4].
Frankly, the UK needs to internalize Fiona Hill's [5] position and start cracking down on fifth columnists like Farage, Corbyn, and their acolytes.
[0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3r39el1ne0o
[1] - https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/26000069.rejection-200m-...
[2] - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/labour-versu...
[3] - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/18/uk-politics...
[4] - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/social-media/article/iran-war-fa...
[5] - xcancel.com/FrankRGardner/status/2027098560647348410
I mean offshore wind, not onshore. Thankfully most of the new ones are being built in England - check https://openinframap.org/#7.05/53.375/3.069, and these aren't curtailed.
But it was incredibly dumb to build many GW of offshore wind in Scotland when the grid was already over capacity.
Even offshore ones face persistent opposition [0].
Frankly, opposition to either onshore or offshore wind farms is dumb and is clearly being weaponized by opponents of the UK.
> But it was incredibly dumb to build many GW of offshore wind in Scotland when the grid was already over capacity
Overcapacity is a good problem to have from a NatSec perspective (as is seen with Chinese and Indian solar).
Also, it's the Scottish Government that has been backing offshore wind farm development for almost a decade [1].
Similar initiatives could have been done in England, but face persistent issues at the local level due to weaponized opposition.
[0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74vj881090o
[1] - https://www.gov.scot/policies/marine-renewable-energy/offsho...
I don't quite understand. The opposition can't be that insurmountable for offshore wind off England coast (instead of Scotland) given 700 giant offshore turbines are being built as we speak off the English coast. Including the world's largest windfarm (Hornsea 3).
Europe seems to be responding well since the Ukraine war, the picture now is a lot more positive than in 2022. The UK has postionined itself well, even without the mass uptake of local generation/storage in it's domestic market.
Electricity prices in the UK are painful, and galling when set by the price of gas, but it’s worth remembering that this model and all this expense has bought a major asset that will only become more important and strategic.
The next milestones to hit are:
* A 10x increase in generation capacity
* A 100x increase in storage capacity
* A 1000x increase in seasonal storage capacity
* Electrification of heating
* Electrification of synfuels and synthetic chemical feedstocks
Full energy sovereignty is achievable within 10 years at wartime-spending levels. Probably 30 years otherwise.
Rehabilitation of nuclear is almost certainly required for the transition and a very good hedge / backstop regardless.
Yeah, we're (UK) only just at the "occasionally cheap 100% renewables" state, and it's maddeningly slow progress. But it seems like a lot of things are suddenly coming online, like battery storage, and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years. https://eandt.theiet.org/2026/04/02/ps12bn-plan-upgrade-scot...
The transition will probably be quite nonlinear: getting from zero to a few days a year of 100% renewables is about as much effort as going from a few days a year to most of the year.
I couldn't disagree more. I'm going to point to Gary Stevenson [1] for why. He could probably get to the point faster but here's the core premise: Europe responded to the energy shocks since 2020 by transferring the better part of a trillion euros to energy companies in the US and the Middle East, particularly for LNG.
Imagine where Europe might be if half a trillion euros was spent on renewables.
The core problem as he describes it is that European governments don't own these providers so it's a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the ultra-wealthy.
Back in the pandemic, Spain was one of the few countries that tackled the inflation shock in a better way with a windfall profits tax. Interestingly, Europe is talking about doing that now [2]. That would be smarter.
Energy prices disproportionately hurt the poor [3]. If the government owned or part-owned the energy (like Norway does) then you could offset that without burning cash to stick your head in the sand for a little bit longer.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi265I48MdI
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/04/europe-energy-windfall-profi...
[3]: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2023/rising-household...
The UK had/has the exact same windfall tax on energy:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-gener... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-profits-le...
And the reason Spain is so well insulated is because they have limited gas interconnection so they have a 'captive supplier' in Algerian gas. Algerian gas can basically only go to Spain, Morocco or the domestic Algerian market. They have some limited LNG export capacity (which is growing and will significantly change the price Spain pays longer term).
Useful background on Mr. Stevenson
https://www.ft.com/content/7e8b47b3-7931-4354-9e8a-47d75d057...
So everything should be cheaper right...RIGHT?
UK is legally required to set the price of electricity to whichever generator has the highest cost - which is natural gas. Its called marginal cost pricing.
It's worth thinking how this would work if it didn't work like this though? Nearly all 'commodity' markets clear this way.
If you switched to 'people get paid what they bid' it's almost certain the market would just converge back to this anyway - but with a lot more gaming and guesswork (wind guessing the gas marginal price to try and get the highest price).
That's only true for spot pricing, right? Longer term supply contracts can embody more "strategic" criteria.
That's how all commodity markets works. All of Europe runs on the same scheme.
Do you think the Saudi's price their $10 per barrel oil at $10? The average price? Median? Or marginal?
They price at at the marginal price.
In the UK what this means is that cheap production like renmewables and storage are incentivized to get built while the most expensive fossil production is shutting down.
Then at some point renewables start to become to marginal producer and prices crater. Which is already happening.
Are there any efforts to fix this?
More renewables and batteries so that gas generators wouldn't have any leftover capacity to bid for.
I believe that no governing party has attempted to fix this. Generally - this set up benefits the oil/gas lobby, so efforts to change it will butt heads with them. UK also trades energy with mainland Europe, which can add a complication with how prices are set.
When I was young they talked about a green revolution. Now with low solar panel costs, as well as batteries and inverters we really are living in a green revolution.
I'm in the UK and am currently being paid to use electricity.
My energy provider uses a tracker tariff which can change every half hour (it does have a maximum cap to prevent the issues seen in Texas). Prices are currently negative, so every kWh I use right now means the electricity company pays me.
Nuclear promised energy which was "too cheap to meter". But solar actually delivered.
If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?
It seems silly, but actually... it's driving useful behavior I suppose. Then again, maybe a good government would notice this and just fast track grid storage rather than distribute that work to all the citizens.
Yes. I have a 4.8kWh battery which is slurping up electrons. It charges either from our solar panels or from cheap grid electricity.
It discharges when prices are high. So it'll mostly go into my oven tonight. If export prices are high, it can also sell back.
Very roughly, we sell about 16% of our stored electricity - the rest is used by our home.
See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/02/30-months-to-3mwh-some-more...
A lot of the value to homeowners is essentially arbitrage on the retail cost of electricity: when prices are high you're going to be paying a lot more to pull electricity from the grid than you would be paid to supply it, so you're better off using up the buffer yourself as opposed to paying for electricity from the grid.
> If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?
Yes, some people do this. There's even a startup built around the idea: https://www.axle.energy/
Sure you could. How much do you think they will pay you per kw? 1/10 what you paid them and they will charge you for using their infrastructure..at least in the US they do.
Overall on it's own that isn't yet profitable to do, unless you're e.g. a wind producer.
Yes, I believe some EVs allow this too.
I don't think that would ever commonly be viable or at least not for a long time. EV's are a lot more than batteries and are proportionally stupidly expensive. If the electricity net arbitrage was worth the degradation of the battery then .... companies would do it themselves and just build the batteries for cheaper at scale.
It is commercially viable. A UK energy company already has a Vehicle to Grid tariff.
https://octopus.energy/power-pack/
See also https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/case-study-uk-electric...
Batteries are getting affordable too - Fogstar do a 16kWh battery for around £2000. Plus, grid scale iron-air batteries sound promising.
This is amazing news. I look forward to my bills going up again next month!
I believe Centrica did some research before the Iran war and found that if we were able to get gas for free, energy bills wouldn't fall and would actually rise over the next few years (because of the mix towards structurally high cost supply).
It says something that the people running the monopoly cash machine are asking questions about bankrupting their customers/ability to pay but politicians are shutting their eyes and pounding onto the accelerator. What a world.
Why are people making (intentionally?) vague statements about prices going up?
Are you referring to the war Trump started, or are you all climate denying loons who love Trump and think net-zero is a Chinese hoax?
Or just nihilists that just think the world is going to shit in multiple ways and refuse to even contemplate small silver linings on dark clouds?
It's impossible to tell from these quips.
We have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. The politicians obsess over net-zero at the expense of dealing with the issues affecting most people.
What if a happy byproduct of pushing for net zero is more investment in renewables, and decoupling the electricity price from gas?
Part of the reason why we have high electricity costs (here in the UK) is that we peg the price to gas generation, on the face of it people complain about that but the higher price allows investments in renewables to make sense on an RoI PoV, effectively it's a subsidy to build out renewables at a higher rate than would otherwise be the case.
Electricity prices are high in the UK but there is a net benefit to it at least some ways, as always the devil is in the details, all the details.
Isn't that just an excuse to justify the scam? Texas has very low electricity prices and at the same time a growing share of renewables.
Been a while since I looked at a map but I don't remember us invading Texas and annexing them as part of His Majesties territories...
Texas has some different choices in their electricity markets but they use the same pay-as-clear marginal pricing system that the above poster thinks is a secret UK plan to subsidise renewables. In reality it is the standard way to set the market price of commodities.
Texas famously had massive spikes in electricty prices and a near failure of the grid because of their electricity market structure, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
That would be wonderful. But that hasn't happened yet, so i'll point out that whatever our current energy strategy is, it's failing miserably and wrecking the economy. For some reason other countries seem to have it figured out much better, so forgive me for not falling over in excitement over the fact that some war in the middle east is costing us a billion less then it might have.
Other countries are not likely spending much less on the transition, it's just that they're paying for it more in tax and less in the electricity bill. The UK's strategy here basically means there's now a huge amount of investment in renewables even without government subsidies. And the nature of renewables and relying on gas in the meantime (which has pretty much always been setting the price of electricity, it's just gotten even more expensive recently) means that there's a relatively more painful period of investment before you get to the cost benefits of a nearly entirely renewable grid.
Between Brexit and the aging population, I don't think joining the rest of the world in poisoning the atmosphere for the future faster is going to improve the UK's situation. There are much, much bigger fish to fry than energy policy for improvement-per-unit-effort.
The UK relies heavily on tourism. Tourism is disrupted by global instability. Climate change and fossil-fuel-catalyzed wars cultivate global instability. And the UK doesn't have the land or people to compete on the global stage in manufacturing exports (not that they do bad work, just that the scale doesn't exactly pan out. Not unless people are really keen on telling the tale of two cities again).
Best policy is likely to focus on domestic affairs (how to keep the country stable and solvent as the population shifts towards more and more retirees) and maybe look into rejoining that massive free-trade sector right down the block that the country so short-sightedly left a short time ago, since it'd really open up the tourism and trade markets.
You seem to make the same comments in every thread about renewable energy regardless of what's actually happening.
Nice to see you again. Yeah, i feel it's a political thing where green initiatives are being pushed against the interest and benefit of voters. The benefits are continually overhyped and frankly in the UK we are seeing none of them. I actually quite like the idea of renewables and don't entirely understand Trumps pathological hatred of them, but i don't think politicians hamstringing our economy to win green points with their pals is a good thing. Also what's the plan here? Fall years behind the rest of the world while we switch over and then expect to magically catch up somehow?
The "political thing" is the oil industry working hard to make you feel like going renewable is a "political thing". It's a matter of life-or-death for them.
If you like the idea of renewables take some time to understand the economics instead of spouting the same tired lies.
They don't "hamstring the economy". Nor will adopting them cause you to "fall behind". The "rest of the world" is rapidly adopting renewables.
> We have some of the highest electricity prices in the world.
Current price −£24.86/MWh (yes you get paid to use it)
Octopus fixed tariff day rates are currently 33.15 p/kWh, or £332/MWh, which is a better representative number for what people are actually paying.
But timeshift seems to be increasingly important.
24.67 pence per kWh, the Energy price cap (fixed till 30 June 2026) is a better representative number for what people are actually paying.
If you fixed at 33p, sucks to be you, my electricity has been free to negative all day.
> my electricity has been free to negative all day
Like a gambler who only talks about their wins, people on these smart energy plans on the few days it goes very cheap only seem to pipe up with the current low unit price, and never mention their longer-term moving-average unit price...
Honestly: jog on.
You can see the transition happening. Right now.
Does this cancel out the high energy prices people in the UK have been paying for the past decade+? Part of the reason the bills are high is because they subsidise the installation of renewable generation.
In hindsight it was quite prescient to be installing renewables wasn't it.
It might have been better to lump some of those costs on gas rather than electricity. Polluter pays and all that.
Sounds like that was a good idea, then? Not sure why you perceive this as some sort of gotcha or an axe to grind.
Yes, building infrastructure costs money. Where's the problem?
Yes. Obviously it does.