So who's working on fixing it? It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature. Meanwhile you have folks seeing these three things together:

- England is 90% renewables

- Renewables are a really cheap source of energy.

- England has very high energy prices.

And the obvious conclusion is that someone is lying. It's eroding support for renewables among those that don't have time to investigate how or why the spot price of gas sets the overall energy price.

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oskarkk a day ago | parent | next [-]

>England is 90% renewables

The thing is, it's nowhere near 90% in general. 90% is the generation right now, with sunlight and good wind. On the site you can see that renewables were 66% in the last 24h, 46% in the last week, and 42% in the last year. I don't think it's possible to have 90% renewable generation overall without massive energy storage.

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pydry a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature.

It kind of is.

Gas is the only source of electricity currently which can be scaled up and down at will and on demand.

Even once grids eventually go 100% green we will probably still use (green, synthesised) stored gas as the power source of last resort on cold, windless nights after batteries and pumped storage have been depleted.

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jackpeterfletch a day ago | parent | prev [-]

My understanding is that legislation is in the works to fix that. But we’ll see.

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teamonkey a day ago | parent [-]

Yesterday it was announced that a trial would take place so that regions near wind farms can receive free energy from them in periods of curtailment.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNewsUK/s/jG5OCSWTTy

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swarnie a day ago | parent [-]

Unless i'm reading this wrong I'm pretty sure i already have this in the UK nad have done for years. What's the trial even for...

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teamonkey a day ago | parent [-]

It’s not currently happening in the UK.

A lot of wind power is generated in Scotland, for example. The power conduits that transmit power along the country can often not deliver all of that power to the South on a windy day. There is an excess of power in the north but the wind farms cannot deliver it, they are not paid to generate power so they switch their wind turbines off, even though there is wind available to capture.

This new test means that wind farms will not switch off in such conditions and electricity prices will be allowed to fall to zero, but only for those in the local area.

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swarnie a day ago | parent [-]

Are you sure?

The Octopus subreddit seem pretty convinced they get negative pricing when its windy.

	▲	teamonkey 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not the same thing. Customers on some of Octopus’ tariffs get occasional zero or negative pricing to spur demand that can help balance the grid or reduce curtailment. This trial is different. I think the real goal is to incentivise local communities to support the construction of wind farms. If you have a wind farm nearby, surplus generation is used to supply you with free power when otherwise the turbines would have been curtailed.