You may think buses suck, but lots of people disagree with you. Including me. I think buses are great! The 13 and the 113 and the SuperLoop near me are all fantastic. Quiet, comfortable, easy to use. I have a car, but living in London, it’s easiest to be multi-modal.

Done right, storage lets you defer some of your grid upgrades for transport, though. And storage is cheaper and generally less politicised.

Yes, there’s a price signal. But the UK grid operator is a regulated natural monopoly, so it is under no existential threat from passing on rising costs of operation like curtailment to its customers. There’s regulatory and other pressure, but that’s not a full substitute for market discipline, and indeed the UK grid operator has not exactly been pulling its finger out to dramatically increase storage and connectivity. We have a congested grid and the plan for relief is insipid. And people end up picking up the bill, and it’s causing blowback because propagandists are saying it’s all because of renewables.

There are some real advantages to colocation, and I shouldn’t have put my question so rhetorically. But there are downsides too. A few mentioned below by stripes. Generally, the challenges of grids are felt most keenly near where there’s high demand / load, so if you put batteries there rather than at the seaside, you get to defer expensive grid upgrades, and you get voltage stabilisation etc where it’s needed. Seaside sites are typically quite constrained, too — there are more degrees of freedom inland. You avoid asset clustering which creates system risk, and you get to distribute your storage more evenly around the country, creating resilience.

That’s all true, but it kind of happens already today in the supply chain, where items that are cheaper to purchase locally are bought locally. But yes, a more robustly activist industrial strategy could include this kind of regulatory requirement. The tradeoff is that some bidders walk away, or that the regulations don’t keep up with changing tech, but that’s always a risk

We could do that. Ultimately that’s a capex vs opex decision.

Insourcing is rather a different thing from a nationalised energy provision system, though. Requiring a certain percentage of final assembly to happen in the UK, or for a percentage of the construction crews to be UK nationals is one thing, having the government run it all is quite another.

And even for insourcing, as always, there’s a question of how far you’re going to go. Do we insist that they buy British gearboxes, generators, bearings, power electronics, yaw systems for nacelles that are assembled in the UK? Siemens has a blade plant in Hull, do we nationalise that? What about the resin, carbon fibre, tooling etc that it uses? There’s no obvious dividing line.

None of this feels very germane to addressing the original issue, which was the high costs of energy for domestic consumers in the UK.

The issue is *paying* producers to do this *while we still have carbon intensive production*. It’s a problem of grid congestion and inability to store enough power

The electricity market is not inelastic! Not in the short term, not in the medium term and not in the long term. Not for retail customers, not for industrial customers, not for wholesalers, not for producers, and not for manufacturers.

Consumers can and do cut demand (smart meters for real-time, buying panels and batteries, time-shifting, insulation, etc), for example.

And blithely ignoring global supply chain economies of scale and learning is just madness. Turbines costs are down by 60% over a decade; panel and battery costs are down so much that families in Pakistan and many African countries are now buying them to avoid grid issues in their own countries. We are just not going to replicate those global effects in a single country, and you are not thinking straight if you dismiss this as unimportant. You want to help British people with the cost of living, right? So don’t push a policy that will mean they are stuck with wildly expensive “British” turbines or panels or whatever, especially when it’s impossible to sever connections with the global supply chain completely: raw materials, electronics etc are all still going to have to come from overseas.

I promise you that I care just as much as you do about a better deal for British consumers, and about seeing British industry thrive, and I’m entirely at peace with nationalised industries where it makes sense, including in energy where a national public retail supplier would make great sense. But your solution to that is objectively worse than mine, not least because you start from incorrect premises about how the relevant markets operate.

Kinda sorta but the wholesale market is quite decoupled from the retail market. It was the retail suppliers that got privatised, the wholesale side was always private. I hate The issues with the way consumer pricing works are important to fix, but the answer lies in some important technical fixes on the wholesale side. Especially RO buyout / restructuring to directly convert windfall rents into consumer savings; levy reform and default time-of-use tariffs, to ensure cheap renewable hours show up in real bills; and targeted storage availability auctions, to cut gas’s grip on marginal price setting.

On top of that, I agree that there is no real advantage in having a private competitive retail energy market. They are all buying the same commodity, so everything on top of that is just dress-up, given that they don’t own the production. But even if we had one national public retailer to buy from, nothing would be cheaper without the kind of technical market fixes I mentioned above.

The UK *is* adding GWs of storage to support renewables. They’re just treated as separate projects, including financing and revenue flows.

What would a more integrated solution look like and why would it be better? Physical colocation? With what? Not the turbines themselves, they’re offshore. And why do it at where the power comes onshore?

Revenue flows and financing are different for good reasons, as I explained above. Coupling them really speaks to me of an old mindset of trying to make wind + storage = firm power. But decoupling the two allows for more flexibility and is better overall.

Best analogy for CfD is to think of a fixed rate mortgage: it’s a bet between you and the bank, right? If you fix at say 5% for five years, and interest rates go up a lot during that time, you’ve won, but if interest rates fall, you’ve lost. Except that for a CfD, what you’ve done is got all the banks to give you a sealed envelope with their best offer of a rate inside, so they’re all competing with each other.

If AI companies wanted to demonstrate their products had social value, they should team up with Slashdot and build a mechanism that requires anyone who has shit karma to have to pose their oh-so-clever points and questions to the AI first, and the posts only go up if the point is an actual issue. Then we could spend less time talking about, say, this CfD pricing mechanism being “privatising profits while socialising risks”, when it’s nothing of the sort

1. The numbers are right there in the article for you. £91 strike price, £79 average 2025 price. That’s a 15% premium, not 50%
2. You don’t understand how a CfD works. See my other answer above. It’s a shared risk mechanism. If spot market prices go above the strike price, as has happened many times in the past, the operators eat the difference and the UK government and public win

Fucking NYT shitty reporting

Fun fact, Madrid gets more rain than London. But I’m from Manchester originally, and getting soaked in the rain was a continuous risk