Beelbeebub

This is correct. It isn't quite as simple as saying "let's ditch the marginal pricing model" However it is undeniable that the current model does still link the day to day energy price to gas prices. Moving away from this to some other method (which absolutely would need to price in the "standby" costs of any low utilisation generators) would help lower the enrgy cost. It is arguable that the current model does generate healthy profits for renwable generators and so encourages the build out.

🎉👏🎉👏🎉 😁 Thank you! 😁 This is 100% my point (aside from net zero being "a con") You and I may disagree about the need to address climate change but that is irrelevant. The core tasks of diversifying energy sources, improving air quality and trying to lower/stabilise energy prices are all things we need to be doing regardless of any individual options on carbon emissions!

There is the suspicion that renewables operators might be gaming the system. If I were a renwable operator and I know that I could dispatch 5GW and that is likely to be the last bid and thus set the price for everyone, I might be tempted to only bid 4Gw so that a gas plant could be the last bid and I make more from selling 4gw at gas prices than 5gw at my prices. A good friend used to work for one of the big producers and they had a small MW range oil plant nicknamed "the rain maker" - it was maintained and staffed all year round and would run for a day or two, but when it did they got paid the super high rates for all the energy (gas, renwable, nuclear) they produced and made a shed load. There are definitely slightly diverging incentives in the current market setup.

Of course one of the issues with UK electricity pricing is the process where gas almost always sets the price electricity even though it is often a small proposition of the mix. This is a policy and market mechanism issue which needs to be addressed. If we only paid the average price for electricity then the price would be considerably cheaper.

OK, no bets as I don't gamble and there's zero chance an Internet bet will be honored either way, but they will probably* fall over 2026 by around 4% overall (dip over spring summer, rise towards winter) *this is dependant on the price of gas over the next few months,which is predicted to fall. However, should something major occur to move gas prices, say - to pluck an example entirely at random - a war breaking out in a major oil and gas producing region - then gas prices could surge as they did in 2022 and the UK price cap will rise. This is the central point - UK energy prices are most affected by the price of gas and not the % of renewable capacity (which has been steadily rising even as prices fell back from the 2022 peak). The more we depend on imported gas and oil the more our economy is subject to those price movements.

The point of the thread is that policies like electrification of heat and transport, increacing solar and wind capacity, reducing heat demand, traditionally described as "Net zero policies" are sensible things to do even if you don't believe in the rationale for reducing carbon emissions. It's worth pointing out that clinging to a belief and course of action despite evidence that it is incorrect is cult like behavior and I have brought evidence that the UK does not have the fossil fuel reserves to continue at current consumption levels without becoming almost entirely dependent on foreign imports So those clinging to the idea that we can have energy security via continuing to use fossil fuels as out primary enter source are the cult members. You can argue that continuing to depend on fossil fuels and thus becoming more exposed to import prices is a good thing for the UK, I'm all ears, but you cannot argue that the UK can reduce said dependence without pursuing a many of the "Net zero" policies

There is a link in this thread already to a report on the levlised cost of generation for various technologies. It shows that solar and onshore wind are already the cheapest only matched by high utilisation ccgt assuming central or lower future gas prices (andignieing the carbon cost). If we are looking further out (1 to 2 decades) then solar and onshore are the cheapest full stop. Gas still has it's place as last generator but as capacity increaces the times when we run with no gas at all will become more frequent. In 2012 coal was the largest electricity source 40% In 2015, gas overtook it. In 2017 we had our first coal free day In 2024 we closed out last coal plant. Now gas is unlikely to totally disappear. It is an excellent backup for dark still times, but I think it likely we will see a gas free day before the end of the decade and they will become more and more common after that whilst the overall % of gas will fall even further

Ethnicity is something relatively clear cut. Sunak clearly has (very recent) ancestry from the Indian subcontinent region. But skin tone, hair, eyes etc are not reliable indicators of enthicity. My sister can (and regularly does) pass for ethnically 100% white whilst I do not. We both have the same ethnic background yet look very different. The circles KK moves in are apt to tie nationality hence citizenship and hence rights to ethnicity. No, I dislike KK because of his views on race and other things. I disagree with his views on NZ because I think his arguments are unsound.

Nope, quite happy to engage facts, KK really shouldn't be given any space. To address (factually) his arguments which I distill as (feel free to correct me if you think I misrepresented them) - some of these argument chain together but I have split them. 1. Net zero destroys our industry, we cannot do both 2. It does 1 because power is expensive (he doesn't say this but he implies it is why NZ destroys industry) 3. NZ is pointless because uk is only 1% of CO2 globally and... 4... We ship activities (implied as manufacturing) to China where they are dirtier. 5. China isn't stupid so they aren't doing NZ and so are beating us. The central argument is 1. Argument 2 is evidence for 1. 1 and 3 are seperate arguments 4 is a statement intended to back up 3 and 1 First off, 3 and 4 China is taking net zero pretty seriously. They are the biggest installers of renewable on the world by miles. At this point someone raises the fac ttgier carbon emissions are rising (which thry are just) or that they are still commissioning coal. So yes they are rising but thry are close to the top - their economy is still in the growth phase and that lead to rising energy use and (for now) rising carbon. However the carbon intensity of the grid (which I argue is a better measure of intent) is falling. It is currently around 550g/kwh,which is about where the UK was in the mid 00's and falling. Yes they are building coal plants, but as cleaner replacements for older ones that are being decommissioned and, crucially, the utilisation of coal is dropping ie they are being used less. And, they are adding renewables at a much greater rate than coal (or other fossil fuels) - of the 540Gw of capacity added in 2025, 430Gw were wind and solar. So China is expanding with a renewables first approach whilst still building out some fossil fuel (mainly coal). The sheer size of China means it's total carbon output will always be huge in comparison to the Uk's. To move onto 2: power is expensive in the UK but not because of NZ, or specifically not because of the underlying technology of wind and solar. There are issues around the pricing structure (electricity price basically being thr gas generated price even though most of the electricity generated is from cheaper wind and a tiny bit of solar). There are also issues with policy costs around (say) insualating homes being loaded onto electricity prices which drive UK the cost. So there is a grain of truth in "High prices because of NZ" - but these are not things intrinsic to NZ, they are the result of specific approaches to NZ. Now to 1. Which is more on this thread topic. Our manufacturing industry has shrunk but it is still very large. It is just less visible now and employs fewer people. Gone are the days of giant factories employing thousands of overall clad men to bash metal making pots and pans. Now we have anonymous industrial units employing a couple of dozen people to churn out industrial machines most of us will never see. We are still in (and this does depend a bit on how you measure it) the top 10 countries being China, Japan, USA, Germany, S Korea, India, Mexico and mixing it with Italy and France. Our economy isn't focused on manufacturing we major in services, particularly financial. Now you can argue this isn't necessarily a good thing (I argue it isn't) - but this focus is another reason put manufacturing isn't as large a portion of our economy as Germany, Japan and Skorea who have all explicitly targeted this sector. High energy prices are bad for manufacturers though. But thr point I argue in this thread that abandoning NZ to focus on fossil fuels as our main power source will ultimately result in greater supply uncertainty and higher energy costs which will have a knock on effect to industry (and households)

As someone who doesn't tick the A box, I heard Kisin'sdog dog whistle loud and clear. He said Sunak can't be English because he's a brown hindu. This despite Sunak being born in the uk and having about as English an upbringing as it is possible to have. Private schools, head boy at Winchester collage, Oxford University etc. None of that counts to Kisin, the brown skin and Hinduism overrule all of that. This is an ethno nationalist view - ie nationality is intrinsically tied to ethnicity and religion. This has led down very dark paths in the past and people who advocate it should be given the coldest of shoulders.

He knows what he said was racist, otherwise why lie about it. And again, he is banging the anti net zero drum whilst also saying we need to produce the cheapest most reliable energy we can, which net zero policies will do (yes we also need reform of energy taxes and markets)

OK first off, Kisin is a racist, lying s**tbag and I cannot believe (I can) QT had him on. But he says we want to produce the cheapest possible, reliable abundant energy that we can. OK so wind and solar with battery for sub hour backup and gas for longer periods.

Yes but the Brent field has long stopped production and what is referred to as Brent crude is actually from a number of fields as far afield as Texas. Of those oilfields only Forties is in the UK and there current produces about 10k barrels a day. Again, all the fields you mentioned (and some fields not yet discovered) are in those estimates given earlier - the ones where production still falls from it's current level of 50% of our current requirements. Which is why it's important that we wind down the industry in a controlled manner. If only there was another industry that required workers used to working on large steel structures with lots of mechanical plant out in the north Sea.

I have quite a large forest. I could cut that wood, haul it out of the forest, have it saw up into timber, stack it to season it and then use it for my building. I don't because 1. The wood I have is less suitible for general construction than the pressure treated softwood I can buy and more suitible for specialist use such as cladding 2. It is much more expensive for me to get a 4x2 this way than to buy one from a timber merchant 3. If I need a specialist wood, which I do from time to time, I have access to it even if it isn't available or is very expensive or backordered. It is the same with oil (and gas). It costs about $35 a barrel to extract oil from UK reserves but less than $10 a barrel in the Middle East.

This also feeds into the "drill for energy security" argument. For gas it is relatively simple. So *if* we were able to extract enough gas for our needs then we could heat homes and run power stations from our own supply. But oil is another matter. We will *always* be dependent on imports for road fuel because of oil and refinery type mismatches. My understanding is us road fuel is mainly refined from imported oil, despite the US being a net exporter of oil, for this reason. So, as transport is vital to our economy and national security, having a system that relies on a product we have to import is bad. The solution to this is to move transport to an energy source we can domestically supply. Previously this was more or less impossible. However the advent of practical for most purposes electric vehicles has solved this. So the net zero policy of electrification of road transport is also the energy security policy of moving away from an import dependent fuel source. The key things politicians who advocate "drill for energy security" omit are 1. There is no plausible scenario where the UK can produce enough oil and gas for current consumption. 2. Even if we could, type mismatch between oil and refineries would mean we have to import fuel anyway 3. Being an open market means the price of domestically produced oil and gas tracks the world price anyway. Therfore not insulating us from price shocks.

Ha! Yeah, but prettier obviously. What is that product? I wonder if you could get around the big box of an outdoor unit with a large black roof/wall mounted panel

I get that. The indoor units aren't great and people on the UK aren't used to warm air heating. I did wonder if it woikd be possible to make a "radiator" - basically an aluminum plate with fins on the back and the gas/condensate tube sandwiched between. So it would look and act exactly like a radiator (no fans etc) but have the working fluid running through it instead of water. Could be cheaper as it would be a dumb unit but manufacturing volumes would be an issue.

I think he mentioned using and air to air heatpump aka an air con unit. Thry are substantially cheaper to buy and install as a large part of the market is retrofit, the whole system is designed to be fitted to a house with minimal disruption,whereas wet heating systems are a major undertaking.

If we can get the various feed stocks without having to extract oil, so much the better. I suspect there are a few sectors that cannot substitute oil/gas. Aviation is one that comes to mind, at least until we have enough cheap electricity to make competitive synthetic fuel. But I'm happy to burn some oil for vital things - it's just burning it for things we don't need to that should be stopped ASAP. I seem to remember doing a calculation a while ago that we could save more carbon/fossil fuel by insulating all homes to 2010 standard than stopping all flights. I vote for warm, cheap to run homes *and* flights to nice places rather than cold, expensive homes and expensive flights.

From a carbon point of view leaving it in the ground is good - obviously that cuts no ice with the "climate change is a myth" lobby, but it is a consideration for some. More importantly, leaving it in the ground means it is availible for use later for important stuff (like pharmaceuticals, chemicals etc). And I would say we need to stop relying on oil/gas ASAP as it doesn't start to run out "decades ahead", it's running out now. Our production is set to fall by 50% by 2035 *under extremely optimistic oil industry projections* (all the colours) Under more sober projections we drop by 50% in about 5 years and will be at about 25% by 2035. This is the bit in the old movies where the pilot taps the fuel gauge and it drops suddenly to empty.

What that graph doesn't capture is the price of the oil extracted and the rate of extraction. The amount of oil you can extract *economically* changes with the price of oil. As oil prices rise, less attractive sources become viable. Canada has one of the world's largest reserves, but as tar sands which are very costly to extract. The clst per barrel is somewhere north of $60 a barrel, whilst Saudi Arabia is below $10. So if the world price is $100 Canada has huge reserves If it's below $50 it has very little. The UK has already picked the low hanging fruit. The remaining reserves are in more costly places to extract. I have looked and I cannot find a single reputable source who says that the UK can achive energy security through fossil fuels. Can anyone find one? (politicians don't count)

World oil production gas never been higher. But uk oil (and gas) peaked around 2000 at about 4x today's rate Note the other big Nsea producer Norway, is also declining albeit slower This is from the industry body last year. UK authorities are significantly underestimating the country's still-recoverable oil and gas reserves due to policies on tax and the environment that mitigate against maximizing resource recovery, industry group Offshore Energies UK said June 23. The group based the assertion on an independent report from consultancy Westwood Global Energy Group, which found remaining recoverable oil and gas reserves could be up to 7.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent, compared with a government estimate of 3.75 billion boe published in February 2025. Note they are pushing the maximum remaining ('recoverable') as 7.5billion boe. Other sources put the maximum at 6bn. This includes stuff we know about and stuff we think we might find. As previously noted the UK uses around 1.4million barrels a day. So 7.5bn divided by 1.4 million is near enough 15 years *absolute maximum* There are cars being bought today that would burn the last drop of British oil in that scenario. And, again, that is the absolute maximum. To quote from the same report There is no escaping the fact that the UK North Sea is a mature basin which is in production decline. While the decline ultimately cannot be prevented, there is still a substantial prize available to companies and the government, if the investment environment allows it. Here's an accompanying illustration. Note the "7.5bn" figure is 'no constraints' and half of that is made up of discoveries and prospects - basically "maybe we come up with a way to get even more oil than we thought" and "maybe we find some more oil" If we take the high case, which still has a lot of finger crossing, it's just over 4bn which is less than 10years. So,whilst there may be more oil and gas about, there isn't going to be much we can get ourselves. We'll have to get it from the big oil producers who are.... 1. USA 2. Saudi Arabia 3. Russia 4. Canada 5. Iran How many countries in that list can we call friendly? Again, the idea that the UK can be energy independent by extracting more oil whilst carrying on as we are (oil based road transport, gas based heating and electricity generation) is a fantasy. We need to reduce our demand and increace our home grown energy - nuclear and renewables. https://www.westwoodenergy.com/news/westwood-insight/westwood-insight-ukcs-geological-potential-remains-but-sentiment-shift-is-needed

Indeed, I wish that too. Yes, with the caveat that, as a precious resourcr, we shouldn't be going to the trouble of getting it out of the ground just to burn it to go a few miles down the road. Rather irrelevant, except to say it's odd how often views on the rigidity of gender go with views against "Net zero" given there should be zero correlation. But on China, they are indeed very hard nosed and yet these ultra pragmatists, in moved by any notions of "wokeness" are building out wind and solar at a frankly astonishing rate. They are electrifying industry at speed - nearly 1/4 of heavy trucks (not cars, not vans but freight trucks) sold in chain last year we electric. Remember this I'd supposed to be the hard to electrifying sector in a country not exactly known for being compact.

OK this is from the website of Ithaca energy, the developers of rosebank. For context, the UK oil consumption at the end of 2025 was around 1.4million barrels a day amd Aberdeen City has a population of around 200k. https://www.ithacaenergy.com/assets/rosebank The Rosebank field has recoverable resources estimated at around 300 million barrels of oil from phase 1 and 2, with Phase 1 targeting an estimated 245 million barrels of oil. The field will be developed with subsea wells tied back to a redeployed Floating Production Storage and Offloading vessel (FPSO), with first production expected in 2026-2027. The Rosebank field will produce in excess of 21 MMSCF of natural gas every day, the equivalent to the daily use of Aberdeen City.

I am using actual projections by industry experts, for both the industry and government and they say that "energy security via fossil fuels" is a fantasy for the UK. So, if we wish to insulate ourselves (ha!) against future shocks from being dependent on a substance we have to import the we must reduce our fossil fuel demand. My question to those that oppose "Net zero" policies such as electrification of road transport can d heating, increace on renewable generation capacity etc is "how do you propose the UK improves it's energy security situation?" And the answer "drill for more gas" - isn't a valid answer because it won't achieve that goal.