How are the fixed costs in this? Here in Sweden I have seen a strong trend that as the grid has become more variable and connected to the European grid, a larger portion of the bill becomes fixed. For most part of the year, the fixed costs are now greater than costs that scale with consumption.

Transmission and construction, crewing and maintenance of of thermal power plants (under the name of "reserve energy") cost a lot of money, which in turn becomes fixed grid costs. On top of that you got consumption costs during periods of poor weather, which in combination of high fossil fuel costs means that the consumption prices spikes. The cost of energy during optimal weather conditions is in contrast so low that at this point they can basically just be rounded down to zero.

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Worksheet a day ago | parent [-]

Chris Norbury, CEO of E.ON UK said:

"Some of the modelling we have suggests that you could get to a position by 2030 where if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be the same as where they are today because of the increase in non-commodity costs."

Fixed costs are enormous and are increasingly driven by paying for the CFDs that back up the economics of wind. The CFD scheme allows wind producers to de-risk from market prices by locking in a fixed price with the government who then recover this from bills.

So, yes you get to enjoy low variable costs when it's windy, but you pay for the priviledge year round.

I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy.

Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.

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youngtaff 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy. Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.

The CfDs set a floor price when there’s lots electricity being generated by renewables but they also contribute to bills when the market price is over the strike price

Electricity bills are higher because we’ve had two fossils fuel shocks in the last 5 years and the costs for decarbonisation are added to electricity bills rather than gas ones

	▲	gendal an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The amount wind farms in the UK have contributed back over the last ten years is a rounding error compared to how much they have received. It's not even close: https://x.com/7Kiwi/status/2031657347433603581 And the scary thing: the wind farms aren't even making that much money! Some projects have been cancelled and others had to re-bid in subsequent auctions to get a higher CFD price than they originally received because they couldn't make the economics work. Worse, there are reasons to believe they're not even fully provisioning for their end-of-life decommissioning costs. The UK's energy policy is unbelievably destructive :(