Energy Prices (Strictly NO referrals!)

Maybe the coal industry had various breaks, but the oil industry with the windfall taxes etc seems to have made hay, just a pity we don't have a sovereign wealth fund to show for it,
and can afford to buy some new ships for the Navy, rather than selling places in our production queue.
Farage&badenoch don't seem to appreciate the cupboardsea-bed is bare, but UK could level the playing field a bit by imposing carbon taxes on chinese goods.

My local fish and chip shop which opened about 10 years ago, was a nice plaice, the rock too, but evolved to a general purpose fast food hole, and seems to have closed a couple of weeks back,
energy prices and fish prices to blame.
 
bigmike20vt said:
and how many £s in tax breaks or subsidies has the fossil fuel industry had over the years... and who will have to pay to decommission nuclear reactors and all the clean up when they get to end of life (I have no idea but I can't help but think it will be us in one way or another)... and then there are the natural disasters caused by spills. shills like Farage like to claim wind turbines kill 1000s of birds and are more environmentally damaging than gas and oil. I think there is a lot of wildlife killed by oil which would disagree.
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Every quarter century you need to replace turbines, maybe recycling some parts, same with battery storage and solar panels. Very little lasts much longer than that. There is significant on costs associated with renewables so prices are not likely to drop too much. Setup and decommissioning are a constant with energy supply. Transportation, grid connectivity and plant, labour costs all add to the £/mw. Energy will never be cheap. If it was people would expect to be able to use too much of it and Energy = Heat.
 
But the alternative which is gas fired power stations and nuclear powerstations don't need any ongoing maintenance, refits, upgrates or have a useful working life right?

Oh wait....
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
But the alternative which is gas fired power stations and nuclear powerstations don't need any ongoing maintenance, refits, upgrates or have a useful working life right?

Oh wait....
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Of course they do but my point stands, energy production will never be cheap.

Of course you can provide the means of production yourself at an upfront cost if you desire or are able to but mass produced energy to the public will never be cheap as a means to reduce or limit consumption.
 
energy isn't and never will be free but renewable energy is cheaper and whilst it may not be clean it is cleaner.

much like EVs are not truly green transport. if you want that get on yer bike as it were. but it's a damn sight cleaner than diesel or petrol.

and hydrogen in small family vehicles is just a giant lie imo , to basically encourage people to yet again kick the can down the road and not transition.

for the record I still have a gas boiler.. but only because it is too good to bin. I kind of wish I had held onto my (shockingly inefficient) 25 year old baxi back boiler a few more years then I could have got a heat pump.
 
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It may be cheaper but w whatever Milliband says you will never get a £300 reduction in energy bills.
If energy was so cheap that everyone used far more, the country would require a much bigger expenditure in hardware and land take (the best, easiest stuff to access) and politically won't happen longer term.
Also every kW may be less chemically polluting but every kW still generates the same heat output, adding to global warming. Considered a bad thing. So financial costs to the consumer will stay to limit consumption and the more affluent amongst us will continue to subsidise the rest.
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
But the alternative which is gas fired power stations and nuclear powerstations don't need any ongoing maintenance, refits, upgrates or have a useful working life right?

Oh wait....
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Over 99% of a gas fired power station is recyclable and they use massively less rare earths or nasty elements in their manufacture than batteries and solar. Any thermal plant needs almost constant maintenance and periodic refits and upgrades. But well maintained thermal plants have lasted 60+ years. You only need to look back 15 - 20 years prior to the wind explosion to see that dispatchable, reliable thermal generation can be cheap. In part because it doesn't need back up for the wrong weather conditions so you maximise the value of your capital investment and the more you run it the cheaper the maintenance costs are (proportional to hours run). One thing driving up the current price of gas electricity is that intermittent up and down of load with extended periods of standby is actually highly damaging to the plant thermal fatigue and offload corrosion being real things. So in proportion of the hours run maintenance costs go up.

Given a blank piece of paper no one would have come up with our current model it took 25 years of uniparty consensus to come up with this economy destroying nightmare.
 
You don’t use rare earth materials in lithium based batteries or solar panels. Solar panels are silicone semiconductors and don’t use rare earths or really any elements that are particularly uncommon (glass, copper, aluminium, silicon).

Some low volume flexible panels like you’d use on a camper van use uncommon elements but no rare earths and you don’t use them in power generation.

Likewise batteries use uncommon elements but nothing designated as a rare earths element.

If you want to point the finger at why electricity is expensive, perhaps take a closer look at privatisation and the internal market we have crafted for ourselves as a result of said privatisation.

Your absolutely right, given a blank price of paper we wouldn’t have drawn the mess we have now but the rational answer is the complete opposite to what you are implying.
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
You don’t use rare earth materials in lithium based batteries or solar panels. Solar panels are silicone semiconductors and don’t use rare earths or really any elements that are particularly uncommon (glass, copper, aluminium, silicon).
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www.iea.org

Executive summary – The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions – Analysis - IEA

The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency.
www.iea.org www.iea.org

I've totally misread that, not large amounts of rare earths in solar some nasties like tin and cadmium. The rare earths are in the windymills.
 
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Hagar said:
Energy will never be cheap. If it was people would expect to be able to use too much of it and Energy = Heat.
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Hagar said:
polluting but every kW still generates the same heat output, adding to global warming.
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you've said it twice .. but eg. using domestic heating isn't causing global warming , like generating kinetic energy for moving stuff from A->B.


...
our energy costs just need to be globally competitive otherwise all the industry and data centres ... won't be either, unless we are more efficient, like heat pumps.
I hope Ireland are getting a good cut/tax from the (AI...) data centres using 25% of their electricity
 
to wit

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Marginal pricing init.

According to my solar app yesterday peaked at 36p/kWh. Today there is a free energy session because of how much wind there is and it’s still 30p/kwh.

I way being a bit flippant with ‘most of the time’ but it’s up at that level when the wind dips.
 
Hagar said:
Also every kW may be less chemically polluting but every kW still generates the same heat output, adding to global warming.
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to be clear chemistry is not my strength but given energy can't be created or destroyed and if the electricity is generated from solar surely all that is happening is the heat is being emitted from a different place, ie from the motor of an electric car rather than the roof of my house (having solar panels have been shown to cool down the inside of a house )
 
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