Net zero could push energy bills up by £120 a year

This is bizarre nonsense, especially considering Nuclear is part of UK's net zero initiative so you are completely wrong before you even get started!



But your entire hypotheses is flawed. Nuclear energy is the most expensive energy known to man, and the prices are increasing massively year on year. Conversely, Solar and wind are the cheapest energy we can produce

And to power nuclear stations requires uranium which the UK has zero production capacity, and most of the world's supply comes from the Russian puppet state of Kazakhstan. Even the technology to build a nuclear power station now heavily relies on china.
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\Conversely, the UK is blessed with some of the highest green energy resources in a develop country, with a massive opportunity to be a leading green energy exporter .

A PhD recipient should not be this scientifically ignorant.

Looking at the lifetime (or over period 'x') amount of energy produced for a power source to evaluate its value, especially with powers sources as intermittent as solar and wind, has to to be one of the more stupid and/ or disengenious arguments made on this forum.

Its amazing how people can trot out such demonstrably incorrect arguments!

Like for example how reneables are now the 'cheapest' forms of electricity generation but yet in many places where they have been deployed in significant amounts the main effect has been increased prices to customers!

The notable exceptions being areas with significant natural potential for hydro or geothermal energy. As they largely avoid the intermittency issues of relying on the winds or when then a particular part of the earth is exposed to the sun.
 
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The question was about cost and you made the false claim that renewable energy is only about increasing energy cost vs nuclear in some perverse conspiracy theory. Currently, adding renewable energy reduces energy prices. Fully renewable will require storage, but the total costs is still far less than nuclear

Have you admitted that nuclear is part of UK's net zero initiative?

No, scaling nuclear wont reduce costs. This Is the fundamental problem with massive monolithic solutions that are.made in so few numbers there is no economies of scale. Compare to solar where they are just printed off a giant factory floor at thousands of panels a day. and require minimal labour complexity to install. The problem with nuclear is that they require massive labour pools for 10-15 years, and often highly skilled labour. Labour is very expensive unless you can exploit workers like china does. This creates massive up front costs but the return period to start paying off the loans is now counted in decades. Gor 15-20 years the projects just accumulate billions of costs each year, and each year the interest on the loans compounds. Solar panels can be up and running within 6 months of breaking ground.

This is why nuclear will never be cost effective. Basic laws of physics and economics prevents that. You need to be building thousands of power stations with effectively slave labour and remove all the necessary red tape that ensures safety.

I'm not against nuclear, it is just nuclear is a horrible choice on purely economic grounds


As for supply, uranium already has supply problems. If you excluded Russian controlled sourced there would be bug supply shortages

No i did not make such a claim whatsoever, i said the goal of net zero is to increase costs.

You are conflating net zero and renewables/nuclear, or I'm not being clear enough.

The reason i brought up nuclear was because no CO2 emissions, looking at your own chart 15 years ago, at that point its cheaper than everything except gas, with a small difference.

That would be the time, corresponding to the whole emergence of climate talk, to invest big in nuclear, thus hitting CO2 targets etc.

But the goal is not to do any of that, but simply increase costs, without actually achieving anything, but using it as an excuse for actions.

I dont know if you understand what i mean or not, but falling into specific discussions about types of power, or the economics of it, is 100% the wrong way forward.

My only point in nuclear is that, at the goal of reducing CO2, you didnt have any other choice, your economic argument might be valid now, but not 15 years ago or so, and now we just dont have enough storage for the power.

Hence as the goal is CO2 emissions, nuclear is the only viable option that is scalable, which is not done, this is one evidence in the fact that the goal of net zero, is not to end up at net zero, but to simply increase costs via laws, taxes, regulations etc.
 
The inexorable march towards net zero continues to fail to deliver the goods

Britain fires up coal plant as weather becomes too hot for solar panels to work efficiently​

Rush to turn on air conditioning during heatwave causes spike in demand for electricity

Britain has started burning coal to generate electricity for the first time in a month and a half, after the heatwave made solar panels too hot to work efficiently.

One unit at Uniper’s Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power plant in Nottinghamshire started producing electricity for the first time in weeks on Monday morning, while another coal-powered plant was warmed up in case it was needed by the early afternoon.

The National Grid turned to coal to generate electricity as a rush to turn on air conditioning and fans across the country during the heatwave led to a spike in demand.

High temperatures over the weekend also reduced the amount of energy generated from solar panels. Output on Sunday was almost a third lower than a week earlier, despite temperatures climbing above 30 degrees celsius across large parts of the country.


 
hmmm

Yes i'm sure it's soley down to the solar panels not working at full efficiency...not the spike in demand and the known ongoing lack of capacity in the system that has been an issue for several years because for the last 13 years our government has either refused to approve building new power stations, or mucked around for long enough the companies that were going to build them walked away to deal with governments that weren't just going to waste years of their time and tens of millions (and that we've been shutting down power stations for 25 years without building anything like enough replacements of any kind).

Oddly enough the panels i've got on my house have been working quite nicely and within maybe 10% of their rated maximum/their normal amount all day, and with the weather as it is they've been producing more power than they have for much of the rest of the year (it's been a fairly smooth curve since around 5:30am, and we're at 22kwh and counting on 4.7kw worth of panels).

So if the issue is "the panels aren't working at full capacity" I'd hate to think what it would be without the scores of private businesses, organisations and residential properties that have fitted panels.
 
There is about 5,000MW of installed solar in the UK so 10% is 500MW if your anecdote were repeated nationally. That about the same as one unit at Ratcliffe on Soar.

Also the Government hasn't refused to allow the building of power stations it's that the economics for building new ones hasn't stacked up. They cost billions and no one is willing to make firm commitments to ensure that return on capital can be made. The capacity market has done something towards this but by and large with the exception of Keadby B no major power stations have been built as a consequence.
 
Everything I know about hydrogen is, it's a complete waste of time developing the idea. It's too expensive to make, store and transport. The funny thing is there is some report somewhere or other that was produced by the UK government that says it's a waste of time, and still the government pours money in to it? That doesn't make sense.

I might add, I don't agree with them pushing heat pumps, either. These are just an avoidance tactic by the government - so they don't have to make more power stations. Heat pumps save the planet, but they don't save the consumer much in the way of money. Many people will never be able to afford to do anything when they inevitably break down.
 
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The inexorable march towards net zero continues to fail to deliver the goods

god I despise the telegraph and it's dishonest reporting. it boggles me how anyone can't see how BS it is and it's massive bias.
my panels take a minor drop in output when it's really warm, tho I think half of this is due to bird crap and dust on the panels but to suggest its drop in output is the cause of grid level shortages risking coal to be used is utter bunk.
 
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I thought I would post a happy thread :cry:

lol, when are we going to see the benefit's of any investment.
This is just to keep those companies making more profits.
Wasn't the privatisation of energy companies supposed to give us cheap energy.
I'm actually shocked if thats all it would take to cut our carbon emissions to zero.
 
Remind me how the U.K. achieving Net Zero is going to make the cube root of Sweet Fanny Adams difference to this:


I‘m not saying that countries shouldn’t clean up their acts where feasible, but it’s a tough sell to low income households, especially when it’s not entirely clear where the money from these green initiatives ends up.
 
god I despise the telegraph and it's dishonest reporting. it boggles me how anyone can't see how BS it is and it's massive bias.
my panels take a minor drop in output when it's really warm, tho I think half of this is due to bird crap and dust on the panels but to suggest its drop in output is the cause of grid level shortages risking coal to be used is utter bunk.
I was seeing something that suggested at least as much was unavailable due to drop in nuclear output (not sure if a reactor was offline or running at reduced output for work).
I think there was also a drop in wind capacity.

God help us if we'd had this hot weather but it was a bit cloudy.
 
I guess we'll see how we achieve Net Zero within the next 7 years, after all our next PM has made a cast iron guarantee the UK will be net zero for electricity production by 2030.
 
Remind me how the U.K. achieving Net Zero is going to make the cube root of Sweet Fanny Adams difference to this:


I‘m not saying that countries shouldn’t clean up their acts where feasible, but it’s a tough sell to low income households, especially when it’s not entirely clear where the money from these green initiatives ends up.
It's always worth noting that some of the worst looking at that map have much higher populations, china for example despite being basically the bulk/cheap manufacturing of half the planet has around two thirds of the output per person of the US, they're also rapidly building out nuclear capacity rather than coal now and are from memory actively taking measures to reduce their pollution from coal etc, which was largely being built to keep up with demand quickly, before they started on their massive civilian nuclear program.
 
A rather important facet missing from this dull conversation is that doing nothing is not free as much as the detractors might wish to knowingly omit. The cost of dealing with increased infrastructural repair, healthcare costs and general loss of productivity associated with pollution are all fairly major downsides on people's wallets and quite frankly £120 per annum is a very marginal amount versus an array of permanent costs that will vastly downgrade global growth.

There is a somewhat valid criticism to be had about absolute emissions not being within the UK's realm of control but if nobody leads by example then there's no incentive and so we all lose regardless.
 
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I guess we'll see how we achieve Net Zero within the next 7 years, after all our next PM has made a cast iron guarantee the UK will be net zero for electricity production by 2030.
I think "net zero" in 7 years is not really possible without a lot more investment, but the likes of solar is helping especially as a lot of it is being done by "small" generators who are doing it mainly for their own use and outputting the excess rather than billion pound projects (in our case we're putting one "average household" worth of power back into the grid almost every day at the moment).
I'm slowly seeing more residential properties with it, the local council have fitted it to some of their few remaining properties, and the likes of one of my local hospitals has fitted some quite large number of panels going by a display they've got showing the current/historical output in reception (IIRC on the day I was there in May they'd hit 1.8mwh by about 4pm).

Electrical generation should never IMO have been put out to be run largely by commercial operations rather than as part of the key governmental infrastructure for the country, as it means that we don't tend to get it built unless there is enough guaranteed profit, although our government refusing to do things like underwrite/gurantee set minimum prices for that capacity and the problems with planning permission probalbly wouldn't have made it much better.
I remember when one of the planned reactors was cancelled because it was considered that paying something like 20 or 30p per KWH wholesale was unbelievable, back at a time when it was around half that (and didn't allow for the fact that wasn't due to kick in for a decade, so inflation would likely have done it anyway).
 
A rather important facet missing from this dull conversation is that doing nothing is not free as much as the detractors might wish to knowingly omit. The cost of dealing with increased infrastructural repair, healthcare costs and general loss of productivity associated with pollution are all fairly major downsides on people's wallets and quite frankly £120 per annum is a very marginal amount versus an array of permanent costs that will vastly downgrade global growth.
Yup.

Even if the only benefit from "net zero" was reduced instances of asthma or simply cleaning up the residues from coal etc it's probably saving that money elsewhere.

I remember the documentaries and stories from my dad about before they brought in the "clean air act" and banned some of the coals from use completely, and heavily restricted the use of others in built up areas, I remember even just 30 years ago before the first of real the attempts to clean up emissions from vehicles and the clouds of smoke you'd get from pretty much every bus or truck, and many cars. I can still remember that smell even now after all those years, including from the likes of the Mr Whippy icecream van.
 
It's always worth noting that some of the worst looking at that map have much higher populations, china for example despite being basically the bulk/cheap manufacturing of half the planet has around two thirds of the output per person of the US, they're also rapidly building out nuclear capacity rather than coal now and are from memory actively taking measures to reduce their pollution from coal etc, which was largely being built to keep up with demand quickly, before they started on their massive civilian nuclear program.
its a very good point. Also china are producing a lot of our "junk". it is hard to blame them when we lap up useless plastic crap. Whilst that pollution may not be on our doorstep we should really still carry the can for it as it is on our behalf.
 
Scaling back green initiatives, not securing our energy security and being too reliant on global pressures and markets doubled energy bills, to the tune of nearly £1,000 in less than 2 years.

£120 seems a good trade off, no?
 
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carbon border tax which EU (UK also discussing) are implementing will tax chinese imports if their manufacture is environmentally unfriendly
- thought China was opening a coal power station a week => not peak carbon emissions yet.
 
god I despise the telegraph and it's dishonest reporting. it boggles me how anyone can't see how BS it is and it's massive bias.
my panels take a minor drop in output when it's really warm, tho I think half of this is due to bird crap and dust on the panels but to suggest its drop in output is the cause of grid level shortages risking coal to be used is utter bunk.

The subtitle literally refers to why demand spiked (air con) and you confirm that the exact cause of this particular surge in demand (hot weather) corresponds with conditions that make solar panels *less* efficient.

Yet again highlighting the frequently poor mismatch between the optimum conditions/ times for 'renewable' electricity generation and the demand for electricity!

And all we get is handwaving to batteries, hydro or some other technology never deployed and often obviously not currently feasibly at the sort of scale that would be needed for 'net zero' to be anything like possible in a country like the UK.
 
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