Gas and coal are expensive because of policies designed to make them expensive. I'm definitely not saying we should go all in on coal or gas, but we also need to stop pretending that them being expensive is the normal run of play.

I'd personally like to see more work done in to nuclear and energy storage (not lithium-ion batteries, please..) and get those things built. Wind and solar need more-or-less an equal amount of base generation to compensate for them, and it should be nuclear (and viable energy storage). That doesn't get enough press, in my view.

Instead, we just hand-wave away burning of wood (comical) alongside gas and coal as base generation, and I find that very poor. Especially wood, if I'm honest.

But don't get me wrong: that we've managed to harvest more energy from wind and the sun is a commendable thing. I would ideally however like to see the solar panels built locally and using materials that can be recycled, ditto with the wind turbine blades (okay, they're manufactured locally, but are not recyclable).

Coal and gas are expensive because of issues with supply and demand. This was most brutally obvious with gas last year, but the same is true of coal - the year on year decline of the European market for coal has meant less domestic production and no significant import capacity. These are not issues that can be corrected overnight. And yes, they're obviously related to public policies, but even now there is no appetite for reversing any of those, so it's not really misleading to say that they're expensive now.

I find it depressing that biomass is so poorly thought of. There's nothing wrong with burning sustainably forested wood, although it probably shouldn't be done at large scale because it's a suboptimal use of land. But biomass encompasses so much more, including agricultural waste, sewage and food waste, and can be regulated almost as easily as fossil fuels to compensate for the unpredictability of sun and wind.

Stripping soil of its nutrients to grow trees for nothing but fuel seems pretty medieval, and seeing as it's not as energy dense as coal, we need more large diesel trucks (and sometimes ships!) to transport it.

I'm not a fan. Waste to energy incineration of otherwise landfill bound waste is of course a good thing, no argument there. I just often find in statistics that virgin wood and waste are mixed together to make it look better than it is.

It's not all policy but price shocks are one of the best ways to change behaviour. Europe does not possess sufficient fossil or nuclear fuel for its energy requirements. It needs other options and these are essentially renewables. Burning wood (and domestic waste) in combined heat and power plants is reasonable as long as harvesting is below replacement rates, which makes it a much better choice than fossil fuels.

Personally, I'd like to see a big investment in syn fuels (but not hydrogen) both as a way to harness and buffer the renewable power cycle. Research into this has been pitifully funded in comparison with, say, batteries, despite the known energetic (higher density) and transport advantages.

We can but hope.

Europe does not possess sufficient fossil or nuclear fuel for its energy requirements.

Which is a specific set of policy decisions, made to please the green crowd who promised the country that wind and solar could produce 100% of our energy without cost or security implications, and who dismissed nuclear, and then derided people who raised concerns about being dependant on overseas suppliers as xenophobic dinosaurs who didn't understand that suppliers like Russia had nothing but good and peaceful intentions and would never do anything nasty, like for instance invading Ukraine and then blackmailing countries by cutting off their energy supplies if they didn't passively acquiesce.

Hence despite the overwhelming majority of the countries heating and cooking being done with gas (and a large share of our electricity generation!) our gas extraction was decommissioned before replacements were in place in favour of buying gas in from abroad. As little as 10 years ago had we been faced with the current situation then we would have been exporting gas and making a massive profit on it, instead of destroying our economy by paying a massive premium in buying gas in from abroad.

This is a massive failure of the "Green" political movement, who have literally frozen the poor, old and vulnerable to death this winter while destroying our economy, and their failure kicks everybody hard in the pocket every month.

If we build nuclear on the terms that Hinkley point C was being constructed on (with no cost to the taxpayer) then we'd still be paying electricity bills of about a tenth of the current prices and we'd have enough juice to replace existing heating with storage heaters and fanheaters without raiding research labs for new technology that doesn't work. We'd also be able to use electric cookers, and have enough juice for electric cars; which we haven't at the moment. Nor will we ever have following the idiotic and brain dead policies that left us in this state.

Current "biomass" plants are burning rainforests which are cut down, shipped to America, turned into wood pellets and then shipped across the Atlantic to be burned here. How anybody can consider that "green" is beyond me; my view is that it's idiotic.

"Gas and coal are expensive because of policies designed to make them expensive."

Gas, coal and oil have been historically artificially very cheap because of massive subsidies. It's only last year due to market forces brought on by Russian invasion that they are priced closer to what their real cost is.

Nuclear isn't the answer because the question isn't about making our energy generation green, it's making it *appear* green.

We are paying for our politicians vanity.

I wonder what the actual cost of coal and gas is once you factor in the damage they do to the environment and the ongoing cost we all have to pay to live with it.

@Naich

"I wonder what the actual cost of coal and gas is once you factor in the damage they do to the environment and the ongoing cost we all have to pay to live with it."

Depending how you tally this you may need to look at the positives to life and severe improvements due to them too

Thanks to the global warming, the winter wasn't that cold, helping to use less energy.

It doesn't mean some states (looking at Germany or Poland) should do much more to stop burning things (and especially coal) to produce electricity.

Germany doesn't like nuclear energy because it's potentially dangerous, but [1]German people don't mind killings thousands of people each year across Europe with their coal-fired power plants . The coalition which the Grünen are part of even [2]prefer to kill more people with coal just to close the last german nuclear power plants. Isn't that insane?

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/air-pollution-deaths-coal-plants-b1826079.html

[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/1124448463/germany-coal-energy-crisis

Be careful when pointing fingers: lots of countries have repeatedly made awful choices in their energy policies.

But let me recap the German situation: the decision to phase out nuclear energy was first taken over a decade ago but subsequently reversed by the next government, only to be reversed again a year later after Fukoshima (the conditions of which cannot be replacated in Germany). The first reversal of policy also reversed the transition to renewable energy, as did dirty deals with Russia to get cheap gas. The second reversal (getting out of nuclear energy for good) was not only horrifcally expensive, it, again did not set the conditions for increasing renewable energy.

Nuclear fission now has no future in Germany: it has been effectively displaced for base load by renewables, which have cheaper marginal costs. What's missing is something to replace gas for cold, dark days in winter.

"skyrocketing electricity prices and energy insecurity" - how is it we see solar and wind at an all time high, yet the diagnosis is that it's fossil fuels that are causing energy insecurity?

As others have noted, the energy policies of the EU are quite deliberately cynical - farming out the inconvenient stuff and putting energy supplies at maximum risk due to poor planning and thin margins of error. That this winter has been so mild has been a blessing for countries on the edge of serious failure, Of course the UK is doing little better.

That we continue to have a lobby who present the energy policies we face as black and white choices between 'good' energy sources and the work of the devil rather than a mix and a compromise that should be made in order to protect the most vulnerable citizens is a continued source of depression. Nice for the middle class bourgeoisie to be able to find a moral absolute to campaign for, but not so nice for people worrying about paying their bills and keeping themselves warm.

There are dozens of lobbies that present various cases on energy sources. For over a hundred years the industry was overwhelmingly dominated by the coal lobby. Nuclear had a moment in the 1950s, and continued to hold quite a decent mindshare until Chernobyl, from which it never really recovered.

In the 1980s coal began to yield to gas, and solar and wind have been beating on the door since about the turn of the century. The most frustrating thing in Britain, specifically, is that wave and tidal power have never captured any significant share of the debate. Probably because Britain lacks the capability to do the hard work of commercialising them, and no other major country is interested enough. Although maybe the Japanese could be, now that they're falling out with nuclear...

I run everything off solar and all i need to do is be a "bit careful" with use between the middle of Nov and middle of Jan. I do burn wood for heat but the wood is just bits of damaged trees in my patch of forest. So I'm smug....

However, I'm not on the 14th floor of a crap tower block in Peckham with no choices and big bills and this is where your (English) government should be doing a lot more from insulation to education. I wont even mention power company profits. Spain reduced VAT, improved LPG imports and basically made sure no one was severely shafted by prices.

France, Spain and Germany are now together building a big hydrogen pipe.

The EU has now capped energy prices and the price per Mwh (megawatt horur) last week in Spain was around 4.84 euros. My mum in Scotland was paying something ridiculous per Kwh.

The point I'm trying to get to is there is a lot going on in th EU to keep the green fascists happy, but there is inter-governmental pragmatism underneath all that to make sure people have their "normality" at a reasonable price and that doesn't f... the environment.

Meanwhile, back in blighty it's all market forces and someone else's fault.

Governments capping prices sounds very nice, but if it still costs more to generate the energy the difference must be financed somehow. Most likely taxes, or borrowing where the interest is paid from taxes.

Either way we pay for the energy, directly or through tax.

Look at the current idiocy in the UK, where the radio never stops telling us how every household is entitled to government handouts, while that same government is inflicting the highest taxes in 70 years on us.

Nice to see Wind+Solar outstripping Gas, but the heading ignores Coal, which is also a fossil fuel.

Include that, and outstripping hasn't happened yet.

Good progress, mind.

the UK is doing little better

The UK is doing it terribly. We have a stupid way of paying for energy. All generators are paid the same, which is the highest price needed to get enough to come online to meet demand at that moment. This means that when we have low levels of wind and solar, more and more expensive sources are fired up and the wind and solar benefit from the high price needed to get that expensive operator online to meet demand. Those expensive generators are particularly expensive because not only do they need to recover the cost of the fuel, in the short time they are running they also need to recover the the even bigger capital investment needed to build them and the cost of maintaining them. All of this means that if wind conditions are poor but not terrible that wind companies still get handsomely rewarded.

What we need is reliable power at a reasonable price. The pricing structure needs to changed to achieve that. A solution would be contracts with the wind generators obliging them to provide reliable power. As wind power in inherently unreliable this would work by them paying for the expensive generation needed when they fail to generate their contracted level of power. When the wind blows well they would provide a high proportion of demand and get paid well. When the wind doesn't blow so well they would need to pay for the expensive operators to come online to replace what they were failing to supply.

The politicians may pat themselves on the back, but much of what is happening is driven by markets rather than policies. High energy prices make renewables (much) more attractive.

A reverse trend highlighting the same issue: The business case for electric cars is pretty much dead at the moment with charging costs equalling those of petrol. This has led to a significant slump in demand for EVs. And that is a key reason why Tesla has slashed its prices (I believe).

"Wind, solar power outstrip fossil fuel generation for EU"

"renewables delivered a fifth of all EU juice"

So, renewables (not just wind and solar but also hydroelectric, geothermal, wave, tide) delivered 20% - , meaning just wind + solar were less than 20%. Unless The Register has a different meaning of 'outstrip' than mine, that means fossil fuels were at less than 20%.

So those 2 headline statements together only make sense if nuclear is 60%+

This is clearly contradicting what is said in the article "...overtaking natural gas as an energy source for the first time". The article makes it clear that it's only natural gas that's been outstripped by wind and solar, not "fossil fuel" total, with nuclear also at around 20%.

The "outstrip fossil fuel generation" headline is total bollocks

So because we got lucky (and it was entirely luck) the coal generators didnt need to come online in force to make up for the lack of generation capacity. Jumping for joy that stupid policy decisions only averted disaster because of our inability to judge the weather/climate accurately enough to tell how cold the winter will be sounds stupid. Anybody remember the concerns about blackouts? Germany rationing gas. Our evil coal plants in the UK destined for mothball getting ready to come online?