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Nicholas Leighton-Hall's avatar

It's a good question. The answer is multi faceted. Wholesale costs are part of the story, then are the cfd contracts, any levy paid out comes under "policy costs". Next comes forecasting errors, if you misread the amount of wind or sun in 24 hours time or its colder than expected, you need to buy more energy last minute, these get added on to. Then add in gas storage. I've a later piece coming out on this, but our lack of storage and strategic reserve means when we need to buy we buy at the highest price. Very different to the us as a proxy. The price cap guarantee is still being paid off in bills too. There's a few more reasons but that's a flavour. It's not just one thing it's a multitude that add up to higher energy bills. Watch this space, hopefully ill be able to show you everything that makes up your energy bill so we can all hopefully see the ways to make it better.

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Nickrl's avatar

CfDs are bad enough but the ROC supported generators are at even worse level of largesse then there is all the other costs that come from running an intermittent power system that still has to abide by the mantra of "keeping the lights on"

I suspect you have tackled this in later blogs but only came across your excellent blog from wading through twitter comments on the AR7 announcement so apologies in advance.

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