> Offshore wind isn't as cost effective as solar, it's the poster boy for high-cost, low-value renewable energy

Its not clear cut.

Part of the reason why electricity is so expensive in the UK is that its tied to natural gas prices. some of it is CFD, but most of it is because a lot of our power comes from natural gas.

We pay for gas on the open market because we aren't self sufficient for gas any more.

Yes solar is cheaper to deploy, but its not as useful on its own. Wind is far far better in the winter.

What we should be doing is getting nuclear plants built. Small ones ideally, but a few bigguns will do. Then we won't be so reliant on natural gas. We also need to get those extra transmission cables built.

(note we could have built 10 nuclear power plants, well EDF at 2002 power prices, but the present government balked because nuclear is bad yo.)

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janc_ 2 days ago | parent [-]

There is also a significant cost to moving electricity production from a relatively small number of centralised plants to almost everywhere. Once the infrastructure is adapted to that, costs should normalise again.

	▲	mullingitover a day ago \| parent [-]
		> There is also a significant cost to moving electricity production from a relatively small number of centralised plants to almost everywhere. Correct, but that cost is a negative number. When the generation happens in the same location where the electricity is used, you don't get the significant transmission losses. You don't have to build and maintain big transformer substations. Obviously this doesn't count for big utility-scale solar arrays. However, every commercial warehouse, for example, could cover its roof and have near-zero transmission losses for most or all of its energy usage.