High electricity prices are less of an issue for me, as the overhead lines here are run by Northern Powergrid. After Storm Arwen, I'm denied opportunity to use any electricity...just imagine the money I'm saving.

As reliable forms of power generation are phased out in favour of "greener" ones ( ie: diesel generators located near wind turbines ), we will all get to experience such temporary unexpected cost savings on a more regular basis.

We should go back to native coal supplies feeding native power stations, then we can have the power reliability we had in the 70s.

Assuming we decide to let any of this power go to southerners of course....

Yep, and once we are addicted to coal, the miners will be on strike for more money (not that I blame them).

At least the wind doesn't go on strike. Well, not today anyway.

A question a few friends and I have discussed is what happens to all this wind energy that is being sucked out of the atmosphere? Assuming every country starts to take 100's of gigawatts of wind movement from the atmosphere, what is the overall global effect on weather systems and climate? When we burned the first coal powered power stations, or drilled the first barrel of dinosaur juice out the ground no-one batted an eyelid or thought about the global consequences or how much there was to go round. If we start extracting all that natural wind and atmospheric movement are we leading ourselves down another path to armagedden?

If you extracted all the wind... yes

But there is rather a lot of wind energy. A single Hurricane is about 10^15W ie. 1 Million nuclear reactors.

"what happens to all this wind energy that is being sucked out of the atmosphere? "

a) as per comment above, there is a LOT of wind energy around, however much we extract it's not going to affect the climate

b) wind is an effect, ultimately, of solar heating, so however much energy we extract gets replenished daily

overhead lines

Thars ya prahblem!

We're pretty much forced to use underground lines here in Florida (aka hurricane central) as overhead just plain doesn't survive.

It does have the side effect of no ugly poles and lines - on the other hand, an underground transformer in my neighbor's front yard caught on fire, and they had to dig it up and replace it. An interesting "my... front yard... is emitting smoke!" moment there.

Was it Optimus Prime?

Back when Fukushima happened, I remember saying something on the lines of - there goes any chance of getting serious about nuclear, oh well, we'll do it anyway twenty years from now. I feel I'm more or less on track.

along with some handy PIR-when-dark lamps that cut in when there is a power cut.

If you have stairs, they may be a life saver.

fnar fnar

or a torch?

I thought privatising electricity generation and supply was supposed to drive down costs, through competition?

Perhaps privatisation doesn't actually work for things that are public services?

Yes, the private industry is now free to buy electricity from Libya.

It just needs the government to pay for the infrastructure to get it to you

Of course it works. For the corporations. The people? Fck them!

In principle, competition should drive down costs. In practice, it doesn't. Just look at the cosy cartels - supermarkets, banks, oil companies, big breweries, etc - who pretend not to be acting in concert whenever they put their prices up. It's even worse in the energy sector because the regulator is weak and there's essentially no genuine competition.

We're also paying extra on our bills to subside the staggeringly high costs of building new nukes. Which are going to get a 30-50 year licence to print money once they come on-stream. No market forces at work there at all.

It is possible to generate electricity in a relatively carbon free way.

Gas: the carbon is in the product.

Electricity price per kWh is about 3 times that of gas -- it should be the other way round to encourage people to change.

I know that many will downvote me for saying this, but we must move away from gas as part of our climate change efforts.

> I know that many will downvote me for saying this, but we must move away from gas as part of our climate change efforts.

From an environmental standpoint you may be right, but there's just no way you're winning that argument today.

Ooop north, they're currently without leccy. If they were all in electric cars, they'd be utterly screwed.

It's true that most gas central heating won't work without electricity, but you can at least light a gas hob to make hot drinks/food. Electric only? Screwed.

Environmentally, we need to move to electric only, but we're simply not nearly prepared enough for that.

The driver for the pricing is the "wholesale" price, which isn't a free market. There's subsidies towards "renewables" ie intermittents, and loading on prices from gas generation. It would be that we should have an energy security policy, but we've not had one of them for decades.

Last century there was a policy of not using gas for electricity production as it was seen to be too valuable to use for this (encourage gas heating to move away from dirty coal fires).

We're still sitting on a lot of coal here, at this rate it'll soon be economical to mine it to make hydrogen.

We haven't had an energy policy (or transport policy or industry policy or housing policy or...) since the Thatcher era. Market forces are supposed to sort this out.

"you can at least light a gas hob to make hot drinks"

I'm guessing you don't have a modern gas hob: as a safety feature, it cuts off the gas supply if there's no electricity.

ICE vehicles run on petrol. Petrol is stored in big tanks in the ground. Petrol is moved from the big tanks in the ground to your vehicle by a pump. The pumps are run by electricity.

On the plus side, pumps run on electricity. Which can be produced by taking some of the tank's contents out, pouring it into a petrol or diesel generator and away you go. Priming the pump as it were. OK, so I guess you could use a wind pump, but that probably wouldn't be spinning.

Some EVs might manage to get juiced up given superchargers can rely on diesel or gas gensets.

"We must move away from gas as part of our climate change efforts."

Indeed. I'm contracting currently at one of the 7 UK GDNs and I can assure you that there are significant efforts going into how to decarbonise the gas supply by using Blue or Green hydrogen.

I'm not surprised the UK has highest bills seeing as the prime motivator is short term corporate profit rather than to provide robust social utility at value. Seeing that the gas in your pipes is supplier agnostic, the fact that so many of these 2 bit rinky-dink billing companies have gone to the wall pretty much proves that they are all built on houses of straw using dodgy hedging mechanisms and other unsound mechanisms to offset the lower tariffs they use to entice customers in in the first place.

If you now count "Zog Energy" it's now 24 failures in 2021 alone. Why on Earth they are not regularly stress tested like the banks is anyone's guess - but that would be too much like hard work for Ofgem right? So we're now back to where we were originally with 4 - 5 major suppliers providing billing for the majority of supply. But hey... market competition in the energy sector right : that'll sort it with minimum effort required from the lazy idiot Politcos!!!

What an absolute utter f**king failure. To paraphrase Mr Dryden from Lawrence of Arabia... "all in all I wish I'd stayed at home in Tunbridge Wells."

Just wait till gas is outlawed because of its emissions and we are all forced to heat our homes from electric at 3-5 times the cost of gas. And charge our electric cars and whatever else. Then all these idiots who have adopted smart meters will enable the electricty companies to charge whatever they like on a minute-by-minute basis depending how much wind is available and how much greed they have that day. Freezing outside? Never mind, electricty for the next 36 hours is only £5 per kw/h, but if you wait for a warm and windy day in the summer, we will supply it to you for only 5 pence. Yes, folks, it's the unregulated free market and competition.

Never mind, the electricty companies will sack all their linesmen and maintenance teams to increase their profits. Why do we need to trim trees and growth alongside power lines - that costs money. why do we need to have local depots stocked with emergency repair materials - we can sell the depot land for housing and make a huge profit. We don't need to have customer service agents around to answer the phone as everyone can do self-service via the online app using their electricty powered computer.

Think I'm joking? Come back in 20 years and ask. Did you ever think you would have to pay for taking your rubbish down the tip? Or that your council would fine you for putting the wrong rubbish in a bin? Or have to put a padlock on your wheelie bin to stop your neighbours using it? Or that you would have to pay per mile for driving a car and insurance ontop of fuel taxes and costs?

Yep, what a fecked up future we have made for ourselves.

Have you thought of taking back control ?

Yes, we tried that. But there were not enough lorry drivers to deliver the control once we had taken it back.

If only the government and industry had 4 years notice that there was likely to be shortage of drivers they could have done something to prepare for it. But that may have involved forward thinking and planning.

Energy companies gambled with low cost schemes to get punters to sign up, got burnt and consumers now have to pay the price, let see how quickly prices come down. On the good news a second storm front should produce some nice wind, oh that's right, wind turbines don't work in strong winds. DOH !! Bring bank nuclear energy !!!

no mention of standing charges, or are they averaged in somehow?

Prior to Bulb going south companies simply failed and the transfer system moved customers to another supplier. Bulb was far too big for this so is running with a £1.7Bn bailout* which should see it through to the spring price cap change - the government is effectively a domestic energy supplier providing subsidised power now.

If the market price hasn't dropped significantly by spring then the consumer price cap rise needed to allow the suppliers a 'break-even' retail price will become the issue leading into the UK May local elections, millions of voters waving eye watering winter bills will be demanding affordable power.

Market economics are very secondary to mid-term political imperatives.

* 1.7M accounts - about 5% of UK domestic, no other supplier has the hedged future supplies to allow them to accommodate this many extra accounts and purchasing what they need on the spot market would likely drive them out of business as well.

If you want to see "gouge", check out the cell phone data rates in most of Canada...