Why we need "Net zero"

[SteamyTea]

8 hours ago, Crofter said:

Today's XKCD seems relevant.

And true to a lot of people.

[Beelbeebub]

"bUt rENeWabLes arE maKiNg elEcTrIcitY mOrE ExPeNsIvE!!...."

[LnP]

On 29/03/2026 at 14:03, -rick- said:

 

This and long term this is where hydrogen can be useful. Use excess solar during the summer to make hydrogen, store it for peaker use in winter. All done in one site, no need to pipe it anywhere.

 

Other note is that batteries can fill all the short term responsive capacity that peaker/stored hyrdo used to do. The only thing batteries can't really do is longer duration peaker load. ie, those 1-2week super cold winter periods.

The problem with using curtailed renewable energy to generate hydrogen (or ammonia) is that the kit is expensive. The capital cost has to be amortised over the small amount of MWh it will produce, so the cost of that electricity will be high.

That's especially hard to justify if the generation has been curtailed due to grid capacity, in which case the money would have been better spent debottlenecking the grid to reduce the curtailment.

There are those who would say that any plan involving hydrogen as an energy vector is doomed to failure due to poor economics. And this will never be fixed by new or improved technology. It's inherent in the thermodynamics.

... Hope my comment makes sense. I jumped in on this thread and haven't read all 24 pages 😀.

[DamonHD]

8 hours ago, LnP said:

The problem with using curtailed renewable energy to generate hydrogen (or ammonia) is that the kit is expensive. The capital cost has to be amortised over the small amount of MWh it will produce, so the cost of that electricity will be high.

That's especially hard to justify if the generation has been curtailed due to grid capacity, in which case the money would have been better spent debottlenecking the grid to reduce the curtailment.

There are those who would say that any plan involving hydrogen as an energy vector is doomed to failure due to poor economics. And this will never be fixed by new or improved technology. It's inherent in the thermodynamics.

... Hope my comment makes sense. I jumped in on this thread and haven't read all 24 pages 😀.

I think that we should be generating stored H2 to cover Dunkelflauten from serious *overbuild* of solar and wind, not from trying to work round transmission constraints.

[saveasteading]

41 minutes ago, DamonHD said:

Dunkelflauten

Love it. Thanks for introducing me to this term.

 

Not in the same league as street train stopping place though.

Edited 15 hours ago by saveasteading

[DamonHD]

Kein Ding

Edited 15 hours ago by DamonHD

[jack]

On 11/04/2026 at 11:11, Beelbeebub said:

"bUt rENeWabLes arE maKiNg elEcTrIcitY mOrE ExPeNsIvE!!...."

 

This is equivalent to posting a picture of an unseasonably low temperature forecast for a particular summer's day and saying "bUt cLImatE ChaNgE is waRmInG thE pLaNet!!...".

[Beelbeebub]

2 hours ago, jack said:

 

This is equivalent to posting a picture of an unseasonably low temperature forecast for a particular summer's day and saying "bUt cLImatE ChaNgE is waRmInG thE pLaNet!!...".

A fair point except the climate example misses the fundamental difference between climate and weather.

 

In this case I'm showing that renewables are cheap. The rise in electricity prices track the rise and fall of gas prices not the rise and rise of renewables.

 

Renewables have steadily risen in last decade

But electricity has tracked gas prices. 

 

The fact electricity is more expensive now is despite our increace in renewables not because of. 

[ProDave]

As mentioned many times, the ridiculous pricing system we have ensures we will be paying prices set by gas, until there is so much renewables that the very last gas power station has shut down.

 

Ministers may say otherwise but that is the sad truth until someone changes the way retail electricity prices are set.

[JohnMo]

41 minutes ago, ProDave said:

As mentioned many times, the ridiculous pricing system we have ensures we will be paying prices set by gas, until there is so much renewables that the very last gas power station has shut down.

 

Listened to podcast on electricity pricing and its way more bonkers than that. Can't recall the exact pricing mechanism, but its a bidding system.  I could bid to supply electric to London although I'm in NE Scotland, be within the pricing range deemed acceptable, they would then look and say its not practical for me supply that electric to London as I am too far away, and then pay me not to generate and instead pay another supplier the highest bid to supply the electric. Until the system is simplified we are stuffed.  Plus there are so many cost adders to the price we pay, it always going to expensive. 

 

Generally the policy setters and the wholesale pricing system has completely lost the plot

[Gone West]

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/blog/wholesale-energy-costs-and-your-bills

 

"Currently in Great Britain, wholesale gas prices can set the price of wholesale electricity a large majority of the time because there are not enough renewables built to avoid some use of gas. As we continue to generate more renewable electricity and develop ways to store it, for example using battery storage, gas could set our electricity prices much less frequently. Based on the National Energy System Operator (NESO)'s modelling, we estimate that gas could set this price just 30% of the time by 2030. This will mean wholesale gas prices will have a much lower impact on electricity bills."

 

[Beelbeebub]

I do get the logic behind the marginal price auction system and it should be pointed out that the CFD system of strike prices basically negates some of that by effectively fixing the price for renewables over a long period. I don't quite know how it feeds into the price we pay as consumers or if the over/under just goes the treasury. 

 

However, it would be nice if the cost savings from renewables could be passed on more. 

 

The flip side is the profits to be made from putting in renewables does encourage more to be put in. 

 

Of course it would be nice if the gov, who can borrow money nice and cheaply (relative to companies) borrowed, built and operated some windfarms and solar parks to sell the power to the grid at a low cost. 

[SteamyTea]

14 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

The flip side is the profits to be made from putting in renewables does encourage more to be put in. 

This is part of the reason the system was set up.  It may have run its course and now need modifying.

 

16 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

Of course it would be nice if the gov, who can borrow money nice and cheaply (relative to companies) borrowed, built and operated some windfarms and solar parks to sell the power to the grid at a low cost. 

While the idea seems good, in principle, private investment would quickly dry up, and/or bigger risks would be taken by the private sector investors on marginal sites/plants/technology knowing the the government would probably bail them out.

 

Financing public services, through private investment has not proved very successful in the past.

[Beelbeebub]

24 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

This is part of the reason the system was set up.  It may have run its course and now need modifying.

Possibly. 

 

24 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

While the idea seems good, in principle, private investment would quickly dry up, and/or bigger risks would be taken by the private sector investors on marginal sites/plants/technology knowing the the government would probably bail them out.

 

Financing public services, through private investment has not proved very successful in the past.

No. I mean the government build and operate the facilities themselves.  They may (prob will) use private companies to do that but the asset will remain the property of the government and be operated by the government. 

 

We used to do it. We used to build and operate national railways, hospitals, schools, even power stations. 

 

Whilst there are pitfalls in this approach, it would be hard to argue that the privatisation model eg railways, water, hospitals has been a success on all fronts. 

 

Edit: I don't mean PFI or similar - I've been involved in hospital and school PFI schemes and they are often really shit for the tax payer. Not only is the build quality really low, the contractual conditions of the "landlord" are terrible. 

 

The power facilities are going to be big enough and around long enough for a corps of efficient government employees to form to operate them. 

Edited 5 hours ago by Beelbeebub

[SteamyTea]

3 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

No. I mean the government build and operate the facilities themselves

I think, when we were part of the EU, there were rules against too much government ownership.  Did not stop the French taking over EDF though, so probably a way around that rule (and similar ones here).

If a government did own, plan, build, run and sell energy (even at arms length) it would affect the private companies investment plans i.e. why bother when the government can undercut.

They could put a capacity cap in place i.e. no more than 20% of the expected 2050 needs.  But then they could also change the rules if they wanted to (think student loans and retirement ages).

I don't know the answer, and I am sure some clever people are working on it, be interesting to see what happens.

[LnP]

Listen to this Dieter Helm podcast... high industrial electricity prices are causing deindustrialization of the UK economy. Energy consuming industries are leaving - chemicals (we now have just one ethylene plant, Grangemouth, left in the UK, after Mosmorran and Wilton closed), ammonia (all now gone from the UK), cement and steel. New investment is not coming in. At the same time, our consumption of these materials hasn't decreased so the CO₂ emissions from the UK might have dropped, but they're just being released somewhere else.

 

"To restore industrial competitiveness, Britain needs permanent, structural reform to electricity pricing—not short-term fixes. This requires three big changes: charge industry based on long‑run marginal system costs rather than loading full network costs onto them; reform the electricity market by moving away from gas‑set wholesale prices towards a capacity‑based “equivalent firm power” system that properly accounts for intermittency; and index carbon prices inversely to oil and gas prices to stabilise overall energy costs. Together with improvements in gas storage and long‑term gas supply contracts from the North Sea, these reforms would deliver predictable, globally competitive energy prices to support both existing industries and the more electricity‑intensive sectors of the future."

 

The long term gas supply contracts he talks about are how to address the often quoted reason why drilling in the North Sea won't help gas pricing or security, that the gas is traded at the spot price on world markets. It doesn't have to be like that. When North Sea gas production started in the late '60s and '70s. The Gas Council, on behalf of British Gas (nationalised state gas company at the time), entered into fixed price contracts with the producers for gas which had to be landed in the UK. There's no reason why new gas drilling licences couldn't be granted on similar conditions. That's essentially how it works with renewables CFDs. Locally produced natural gas is much better for the environment that liquifying it to LNG in the US or the Middle East, shipping it over here and then vaporising it again.

 

He also makes the point that renewables are not cheap. They appear cheap because the generators don't have to pay the full system costs - intermittency and grid capacity. To compare intermittent renewables with firm power from e.g. a CCGT, the renewables should be required to provide and pay for the batteries or whatever. Regarding grid capacity, the UK consumes about 45 GW. 60 GW of firm power generating capacity from a few power stations, situated close to consumers, used to be sufficient to deal with peaks. We now have 120 GW peak renewable capacity spread around the grid, remote from consumers and still they doesn't provide all our electricity. Despite that, in the latest off-shore wind auctions (AR7), we had to contract for a strike price of £91/MWh. Renewables aren't cheap.

[Beelbeebub]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

I think, when we were part of the EU, there were rules against too much government ownership.  Did not stop the French taking over EDF though, so probably a way around that rule (and similar ones here).

If a government did own, plan, build, run and sell energy (even at arms length) it would affect the private companies investment plans i.e. why bother when the government can undercut.

They could put a capacity cap in place i.e. no more than 20% of the expected 2050 needs.  But then they could also change the rules if they wanted to (think student loans and retirement ages).

I don't know the answer, and I am sure some clever people are working on it, be interesting to see what happens.

The EU has rules around government involvement but I don't think they are absolute - the NHS wouldn't have been able to exist otherwise.

 

I agree there could be some market distortions but I'm not sure it would stop people joining unless the government had so much capacity that nobody else was ever needed to generate - but at that point, by definition, we wouldn't need the extra capacity so the problem is moot!😁 

 

Maybe if the government built and owned the storage facilities? Eg pumped hydro and battery. 

 

That way they would be creating an additional market for the excess power. Big long term infa like pumped hydro is more suited to government ownership rather than quarter to quarter shareholders.  And building big battery farms (or providing lots of domestic batteries) would provide a "prime the pump" investment for UK based battery manufacturing... 

 

[saveasteading]

2 hours ago, Beelbeebub said:

the asset will remain the property of the government and be operated by the government. 

Isn't the grid completely private? We were discussing this a week or so ago.

[Beelbeebub]

@LnP

 

I don't disagree with the idea that the high elec price is an issue or that we could do with some sort of reform to bring it down. 

 

And pricing intermittently into the renewables price would effectively take the place of the marginal auctions now, though it might help by better ammortising the intermittent gas stations costs with the renewables cost. 

 

But I do quibble with a few things.... 

 

8 minutes ago, LnP said:

Together with improvements in gas storage and long‑term gas supply contracts from the North Sea,

Yes, better storage would be good but the "long term gas... North Sea" bit is (potentially) a bit more of an issue.  The core point of this thread is that UK North Sea gas is running out - even the Norwegians are seeing production falling, albeit at a slower rate than us.  So if by "long term gas... North Sea" you mean drilling more to get more gas - nope.  I can see (ha!) a potential for drilling new gas fields specifically for providing gas to power stations when they are needed as backup for renewables (sort of storage except we never put the gas in), but that only works of the fields are vertically integrated with the power stations. 

 

15 minutes ago, LnP said:

the UK consumes about 45 GW. 60 GW of firm power generating capacity from a few power stations, situated close to consumers, used to be sufficient to deal with peaks. We now have 120 GW peak renewable capacity spread around the grid, remote from consumers and still they doesn't provide all our electricity. Despite that, in the latest off-shore wind auctions (AR7), we had to contract for a strike price of £91/MWh. Renewables aren't cheap.

The UK peak is now down closer to 35GW and we have nowhere near 120GW of renewables capacity (though your point about having to have a greater "nameplate" capacity to peak demand ratio for renewables vs thermal is very true)

 

I would point out that solar can be extremely close to the consumer ie on their roof.  This is visible in current data when the national consumption diverge from the transmission load as more LV solar supplies the demand without having to travel long distances. 

[Beelbeebub]

7 minutes ago, saveasteading said:

Isn't the grid completely private? We were discussing this a week or so ago.

I'm not sure.  It is a company but is it one of those weird ones where the Gov is 50.1% share holder? 

[Beelbeebub]

 

You can see the difference between the red/white lines which are the demand on the transmission system vs the pink/red lines which are the actual consumption of homes and businesses (plus import /export etc) 

 

The difference is the amount of LV solar &. Wind which are the renewables that operate on the low voltage distribution network

 

At this time of year almost all my instantaneous electrical demand is met by my solar system.