I just found myself getting a tad infuriated at the economic model for energy in the UK.
The UK, despite being barely a blip on the radar of global carbon emissions, are quite obsessed with becoming a 100% green nation, even if it comes at the cost of the citizens' quality of life.
Which it does.
But I never realised until recently just how much this mindset has impacted the everyday schmuck trying to get by on pennies. I did wonder why, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the UK was even affected. Why aren't we energy independent already? After all, we were for, well, most of our entire history. Why not now?
It's not that becoming green is inherently bad. It's just the country's 'leadership' can't get anything right and have an accelerationist and short-term gains mindset that is NOT conducive to running a country. In short, they have no fucking clue what they're doing.
So why aren't we energy independent? Some obvious reasons are the fact that we've been phasing out coal for a long time now, but what I didn't know is that our oil and gas reserves are pretty much running dry. 180 out of 283 total fields - 2/3rds - will have run dry in the next 6 years.
It's politically contentious to open new ones, so let's consider that a dead end.
We do, however, have a pretty robust wind farm economy. 30% of energy was wind in 2023, with another 15% coming from nuclear. With solar and other forms, that's a combined 55%+ of energy that is either renewable or nuclear on a good year.
Add to the fact that most our imported energy comes from France and Norway who are both well over 90% green at this point, we're around 70% green.
Amazing! People were promised this would mean energy prices would plummet in no time.
We were lied to
If anything, people say, prices have skyrocketed. Doubled, even tripled in some cases, since the pandemic and the war. But saying that implies it's specifically the pandemic and the war's fault. it isn't! It's the fault of the economic model the British people are victim to - and to be clear, it's working exactly as intended.
Marginal Pricing
This pricing method is apparently used across many different commodity markets, and though it does have its advantages, it comes with obvious problems. Namely, impoverishing the population and sending insurmountable piles of profits to various corporations.
Marginal Pricing is basically where you have a diversity of different sources of energy - wind, solar, nuclear, gas - but the price is set by the most expensive one. regardless of how much of that source is used.
Thus, if Renewable energy accounted for 99% of our energy needs at a cost of $1 per hour (keeping it nonsensically simple), and the remaining 1% was needed by gas which cost $100 per hour, then the entire energy market would be set at $100 per hour.
Here we can see gas prices skyrocketed in 2022, while renewables and nuclear remained spectacularly low. While only a minority of gas was required to power the country, it set the price of all energy at ridiculous levels.
In the UK, the power is turned on in order of cleanliness. Renewables come on first, followed by Nuclear as much as needed. Need more? Finally you get topped up by gas.
This in itself sounds reasonable. Should we increase our renewables and nuclear, we would in theory never need to spill over to the final step - gas - and the prices of energy would immediately plummet to fractions of the current price.
Keep building windmills!
In practice though, the UK almost perpetually needs gas, even if it's a single drop, and so the price won't budge. It won't go down with an average as the cost of renewables get cheaper. It'll just stubbornly sit at the highest price determined by Russia and the objectively evil OPEC cartel.
As long as we have days that aren't very windy or sunny, this will always be the case. In fact, prices will go higher the more we go towards renewables, as the very process of turning gas plants on and off is an expensive thing, as is keeping them on standby acquiring no profits.
The practical upshot here is that the average population start to feel like green energy is doing fuck all for their quality of life, as they watch everything get increasingly expensive, and not unreasonably conclude that it's the fact that energy is becoming renewable that is making it so expensive. Thus, people become anti-green, funding dries up, and we fall back on fossil fuels.
To be clear, as the chart above demonstrates, renewables is by far the cheapest form of energy so far, although nuclear, in my humble opinion, is still the best for reasons I think are obvious.
There's a kind of spiral of disincentives, too. When people get turned off by renewable methods, they are less inclined to, say, buy an electric car or install energy efficient temperature controls in their homes (there's this new thing called heat pumps apparently? I hate the word pump but I'm open to the technology). Why replace your gas heater with something electric when it's just going to (seemingly) cost you even more? Fewer people are going to make that connection, meaning a reduction in efficiency, meaning higher demand in overall energy, and more dependence on that final, expensive level of energy, gas.
A couple of years ago, an admission of guilt came from the government in their pledge to reform this model, in part by 'decoupling global fossil fuel prices from electricity produced by cheaper renewables'. But, that was 2 years ago and I haven't heard of anything about this since. They just say things once and then move on, immediately and actively forgetting it was ever said.
I suppose the current government is too busy working overtime to get zero seats in the next election.
One could argue that things have to get worse before they get better, and we should grit our teeth, shut up and take it until the country is sufficiently self-sufficient with nuclear power and wind.
We could come together and collectively agree to just use less energy. Start washing our clothes in the bathtub again, scrubbing away with a traditional old washboard and a handful of elbow grease.
Turn off the TVs and get our entertainment from nature. Make public transportation appealingly affordable and reliable.
But... we won't.
Until we surround the entire island with a fortress of offshore wind farms and spend the next 73 years fighting for approval for a single nuclear plant because NIMBYs think it'll cause a nuclear winter, prices in the UK will continue to be held hostage.
I can think of one positive out of this. Because the prices are set at ridiculous levels due to gas, renewable energy is getting massive profits which they are incentivised to use to increase their share by building even more. But somehow I think they have far more interesting in saying 'fuck you' than they do using that cheap energy to lower average prices. Why lower it when you can just go with what everyone is forced to pay?
So, in the meantime, guess y'all better get used to paying through your arses until the very last tiny, tiny droplet of oil is halted for good. Don't hold your breath, though. Your great grandchildren might have a chance, if there's any of you left.
Addendum
I'm totally aware that this is way more complex than I can even hope to understand, but the more I learn, the more I realise it's all just layer upon layer of unnecessary pricing. People used to put solar panels on their rooftops and if they had excess power they could sell it back to the grid, save money!
That is until the govenrment taxed it as 'an income'.
15% of the energy price you pay goes towards 'environmental and social cost’ whatever that means.
The list just goes on and on. Getting Shafted.
Global move by a handful deciding on our behalf is walking into a trap of taxes, corporation manipulation, government interference all dancing to the pipers tune.
Western world problem where this is being promoted to the hilt using social media to confuse the masses.
What are they going to do with those ugly big wind turbines when they pack up, after interrupting bird migration routes, taking up farming land etc?
Putting solar on your roof advertises batteries within the individual homestead, ripe for theft. Perhaps all these massive roof spaces owned by Malls, parking lots should be targeted. Solar farms are open to discussion in rural sunny areas when able to connect into a national grid.
All supposition currently, many people in the know working with overcoming currently, at the moment I feel we are simply being screwed every which way!
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 59/69) Liquid rewards.
Most if not all the issues you touch on I'm pretty certain can be addressed with the right people, knowledge and willpower - in the case of windmills, GPS tracking migration patterns is easy and cheap nowadays. Build around the birds. Develop tech minimizing harm, talk to wildlife experts etc.
But they just don't. They just bulldoze the world in the name of climate change. And we pay for it via tax. Blegh.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda they cried, total blegh!
This must make sense to someone somewhere, but how?????
All so counter intuitive. Counter logical...unless that logic is benefiting some obscure entity. Certainly not the consumer.
Oh yeah, our oil companies and our renewable energy companies have been recording record profits from the moment the Russia-Ukraine war began!
As far as I can tell since writing this, the reason is that everyone must make at least some profit. At the same time, all electricity is pooled together and then sent out as a single wholesale energy source: there is no system in place where you can just be powered by one type. So they are all forced to make huge profits.
However, I also learnt that, despite how massive profits going to renewables could be a positive (incentivising even more renewables) they actually have profit caps put on them and the rest of the profit gets sent to the government, who then waste it on getting themselves new homes in London or whatever lol.
This also means the government has a massive disincentive to create cheaper energy. Sigh.
🙁
Hi @mobbs,
Thank you for participating in the #teamuk curated tag. We have upvoted your quality content.
For more information visit our discord https://discord.gg/8CVx2Am