Why are electricity bills going up? Gas has played a part, particularly in the short term, but if you zoom out and look at a longer timescale, renewables are the main driver of high prices and will continue to be so. A thread 🧵(1/n)
When you dig into the detail, electricity bills are up by £339, from £587 to £894 inc. VAT since April 2019. Of this, Renewables related costs are up £128 - of which network costs +£75, Capacity Market +£12 and subsidies +£40, comprising RO's +£25, CfDs +£11 & FiTs +£4 (2/n)
Direct fuel costs (ex-CfDs), which is mainly the increase in gas prices, are up slightly less at £113, reflecting the increase in wholesale prices going up from ~£62/MWh to £93/MWh. Gas prices up more steeply from £22/MWh to £41/MWh (3/n)
Other costs (Adjustment Allowance, Op Costs, Smart Meters and other ancillary costs) are up £49. Policy costs (ex RO's & FiTs) including Energy Company Obligation and Warm Home Discount, are up £21 (4/n)
Although the VAT rare has stayed the same the VAT take has gone up £16 and the larger margin allowance has pushed up the profit element by £12. (5/n)
So, where are bills going? Renewables Obligation subsidies are forecast to rise from £7.6bn in 2023/24 to £8.5bn in 2026/27. Feed-in-Tariffs will rise with inflation and new projects coming online will push up CfD costs too, especially if gas prices fall (6/n)
More intermittent renewables on the grid will push up grid balancing costs from the current £2.5bn and the OBR forecasts grid backup costs through the Capacity Market to go up from £1bn last FY to £4bn in 2027/28, again pushing bills up (7/n)
Then we have the Clean Power 2030 plan, costing £260-290bn according to NESO, that will likely add £26-29bn/yr to bills if completed, saving at most £7bn in gas used for electricity. (8/n)
Gas-fired electricity is also subject to a carbon tax through the Emissions Trading Scheme that currently adds about £14/MWh to wholesale prices and this is due to rise as the cost of carbon goes up from £42/tCO2 to £147/tCO2 (9/n)
If you want to know why your electricity bill is going up, look to renewables and the broader Net Zero policies for the answer. We need to stop this madness now (10/n).
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We now have proof that @theCCCuk is the living embodiment of insanity. A thread 🧵(1/n)
Back in 2023, the Royal Society produced a report on Long Term Storage and found that we sometimes get back-to-back low wind years that means a renewables heavy grid needs lots of storage to keep the lights on (2/n)
Then CEO of the CCC, Chris Stark (now head of Miliband's Mission Control) admitted they had made a mistake in only considering a single year of data when calculating how much electricity storage we would need (3/n)
The Climate Change Committee recently released the 7th Carbon Budget and complained a lot about misinformation. But the CCC is peddling disinformation of its own that destroys its credibility. A 🧵 (1/n)
First, despite whining about the poor take up of heat pumps, as far as we can tell, neither the current nor the prior CEO have heat pumps in their own homes. (2/n)
More seriously, the cost of renewable electricity that underpins most of the economics and technology take up rates in their report is away with the fairies: £38/MWh for offshore wind delivered in 2030 (3/n)
The Reform Party were the only main party to fight the last election on a platform of scrapping Net Zero. But their recent press conference on more detailed energy policy left a lot to be desired 🧵(1/n)
They proposed:
1) A windfall tax on renewables 2) A solar farm tax on farmers 3) A ban on batteries 4) Force new transmission cables underground
(2/n)
A windfall tax might be the only effective kludge to get around the generous subsidy contracts, but even this might fall foul of discriminatory "Qualifying Change in Law" (QCiL) provisions in CfD contracts (3/n)
Recent announcements by the Government about Allocation Round 7 (AR7) renewables auction and the subsidies for tree-burning at Drax show Net Zero isn't working. A thread 🧵(1/n)
First up, we have the Clean Industry Bonus. Effectively an extra bung for wind farm developers to build manufacturing facilities in the UK. But if wind is so cheap, why do they need extra subsidies at all. Up to £27m is on offer per GW of installed capacity. (2/n)
Now we have a very late consultation on AR7. For AR6, we knew the strike prices by now and the budget was published in early March 2024. This year, the auction won't start until the summer (3/n)
Government revisions to EPC regulations will be used as a stick to beat us. A thread 🧵(1/n)
The Government wants EPCs to act as an enabling tool to improve the energy performance of buildings, to support their Clean Power 2030 plan that called for residential electricity use to fall be 20% by 2030 (2/n)
They also want to judge our homes on their level of "Smart Readiness" - in other words how ready is your home to be controlled by penal prices when wind and solar cannot meet your electricity demand to cook dinner. Rationing by another name. (3/n)
🚨BREAKING🚨 REMAgate - How the Government’s Review of Electricity Market Arrangements is being subverted by bad data, conflicts of interest and a web of activists. Link to full article at base of 🧵 (1/n)
The Government is considering changing the way wholesale electricity prices are set from a single national price to locational pricing, either several zonal prices or hundreds of nodal prices (2/n)
The head of @ofgem Jonathan Brearley has gone on record supporting zonal prices. (3/n)