Power demand is often inelastic. There are many places in summer where people would pay $200/kWh to run a small air conditioning unit, for example, when their normal price of power is $0.10/kWh. There is no reason to shift toward generation sources that have price uncertainty when demand is inelastic like this. See the exact same thing in healthcare. The proper solution to this economic problem at a societal level is to have a predictable low price of available power.

Everyone adapts to the single most expensive uneven form of local pricing: property prices.

I think there's a very strong case to link grid and generation capacity improvements to local pricing in the effective area, even if it doesn't end up being through the market. Make the link explicit: "if this pylon project is built, we will give everyone in the receiving county 1p/unit off their bill for five years."

If you can't handle volatile prices and know your demand in advance then simply by PPAs or energy futures?

You know, the standard method all markets use to handle volatility. But apparently electricity is different and we need enormous subsidies instead.

It is actually that simple. The current pricing system was created for a grid that no longer exists. There is now lots of wind generation, solar, battery power, etc. And growing rapidly. Both on the grid and domestic. And soon large amounts of batteries with wheels capable of powering houses and delivering power to the grid.

All this means lots of fluctuations in power availability and cost. Pretending that it costs the same all the time everywhere is irrational. If you give people incentives to adapt to these fluctuations, they will. Energy providers like Octopus prove that at scale. They by the way are a big proponent of more localized power. Because it's just more optimal.

Price incentives cause people and companies to adapt their behavior. Including when to to use power and where to use power. Likewise, it incentivizes power companies to invest in power generation where the demand is instead of where the NIMBY's are not (like Scottland). Speaking of NIMBY's, if they could benefit from lower pricing, they'd probably love wind power a lot more. Buy more electric cars, do the laundry when it's windy, etc.

As for base load. Nobody ever specifies a number in GW or GWH. It's a very fuzzy notion that people just assert is needed in huge (unspecified) amounts. If you put actual numbers on it, you would be able to have a sane discussion on (much) cheaper alternatives. But that never happens. Most discussions around base load center on the notion that we allegedly need a lot of it. What's the budget we need to reserve for that? How much? When? Where? Why? Are there any alternatives? The debate is mostly completely irrational and hand wavy on this.

There is a basic notion that power companies don't mind charging the same rate nationally because that means they make lots of money charging for mostly cheap power available everywhere except in a handful of places. The way the system works is that everybody pays the highest price on the system. Localized prices would introduce lots of variation and cause lots of reasons for power companies to optimize their power delivery and pricing. High prices mean unhappy customers voting with their feet. They are being shielded from that currently.

It's a big reason they are resisting changes on this front. In some cases they actually get paid to not generate power or discard it. That's wasteful. Scottland has plenty of base load. They are exporting their power surplus most of the time.

> Expensive legacy gas and nuclear plants provide base load power at scale. Something renewables don’t really do.

Running hydro, biogas (e.g. in Denmark) and offshore wind (UK, Spain, France, Italy) can definitely fulfill base load demand on the basis of renewable energy generation. With solar, enough overcapacity can guarantee base load during the day even when it's cloudy, and in the summer the solar overcapacity can be used to run synth-fuel plants for those things that we absolutely cannot run with electricity (ships and large airplanes).

Additionally, we can reduce base load demand during night time... a lot of places are still running incandescent lighting, for example. Replace that with LEDs, better reflectors (for less waste) and movement detectors, and you tackle light pollution at night at the same time. Or heat, add storage to a heat pump system to avoid having to run the heat pump at night. And for fucks sake France please get rid of resistive heating.

I wonder if you could use tunnel boring machines to dig tunnels to run power cables to avoid some of the NIMBY objections. Expensive sure but the tunnels will be there basically forever.

Which is why the UK is putting in subsea cables between Scotland and England despite the added cost.

Those transmission components are expected to cost the taxpayer at least £54 bn (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62085297). Transmission, of course, doesn't solve storage, which, to quote the article, "can’t really be stored or stockpiled on an industrial scale". Because it can't. Batteries are orders of magnitude less than what is needed, as is hydro.

Do you think anyone would be building mammoth turbines in the North of Scotland without access to the Southern markets? Oh yes please, I really want to invest several billion pounds in order to serve Ullapool and Wick, that makes my capitalist bones tingle.

But "nuclear expensive", and of cause that isn't to do with the planning process at all. Not if you have a competing product to sell.

The UK has the most expensive electricity in the developed world, and approximately 10 times the CO2 footprint per kWh of France, or of France since the 1980s. If the goal of the renewable energy policy was to be a world leader, it has dramatically failed.

The grid can’t move infinite power through any one point.

Substations and long distance transmission lines make local production a meaningful thing with real upsides. The overall grid avoids losses when power isn’t going through long distance transmission lines. Further as heat increases transmission losses and transmission losses produce heat, lowering the power sent through a long distance transmission line makes it more efficient.

Yes, but that's partly a consequence of how the German electricity market operates and the neglected state of its infrastructure, isn't it?

Wind power and other intermittent sources create grid instability, which drives up costs.

And to my knowledge, Germany has chosen not to have different bidding markets within the country (or has at least kept prices consistent across its four markets) to protect vital industries in the west?

Yes, one of the problems of renewables is that they are highly correlated as to when they generate power, so the value of the power they produce (per kWh) is much lower than it would be if they were uncorrelated with each other. Since we have all invested so heavily in renewables, there is generally a huge amount of excess power generated at these peak times that has to be burned. The correct marginal price of those joules that have to be burned is $0.

Providing that power back to the grid for free is about the right price for the power, and if you would like to be the one to burn it instead (because that is what the grid is doing with a lot of that power), I assume you are free to do so.

"They force you to give back any excess power for free to the grid."

If the power being generated is in excess of what the grid is consuming then it is worthless. I've seen people suggest installing bitcoin mining hardware directly inside wind turbines so they can consume excess electricity and make a profit.

Just because you misunderstood what the article was about does not make it clickbait. The article answers the question in the title in a generalized way and I did not interpret it the way you did on first read.

From wikipedia:

>Data showed that failure to winterize power sources, principally natural gas infrastructure but also to a lesser extent wind turbines, had caused the grid failure,[15][16] with a drop in power production from natural gas more than five times greater than that from wind turbines.

What's the difference between "Our generators & compressors froze over" and "natural gas infrastructure froze over"? What's the PR gain from blaming yourself?

One thing that bothers me about Nebula lately is their apparent shift toward quantity over quality.

They started as a handpicked group of creators who consistently produced excellent content, but it seems they've fallen into that classic 'eternal growth' trap, lowering their standards and accepting creators who, IMO, put out mediocre or lazy stuff.

The platform's now flooded with so many creators that finding good content has become a real challenge. The irony is that I remember Nebula founders advertising the lack of YouTube’s recommendation system and ratings as a feature. While that made perfect sense in a carefully curated environment, these tools have become necessary now that, like on YouTube, it's hard to separate signal from noise.

I would like to use Nebula - I even bought a subscription once - but will not until they add comments.