Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

mytailorisrich

11am, nicely sunny-ish and quite windy here... and so 65% wind, 25% solar.

nickslaughter02

> Britain paying highest electricity prices in the world for second year running > Ed Miliband’s net zero targets are facing fresh scrutiny after Britain was found to be paying the highest electricity prices in the developed world. > New data published on Tuesday showed the price paid by UK industry for power was 63pc higher than in France and 27pc higher than in Germany. > Britain is also the second-most expensive country in the world for household electricity, with billpayers paying twice as much as those in the US. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/britain-paying-highest-e...

PunchyHamster

and still somehow pay tons for "cheap" green electricity

idiotsecant

This is a 'lawyer-worded' headline. I am an enormous fan of renewables, I am an electrical engineer who designs control systems for renewables exclusively. My career depends on renewables. Headlines like this do nobody any favors. The problem with renewables is that you cannot run a grid on renewables alone. Many days will have an abundant oversupply, like the day shown. Many days will not. Consumers are not tolerant of brownouts in the west. We need pump storage hydro, we need massive improvements to the transmission system, and we need battery storage plants (in that order). Its fine to celebrate days of high renewable GW output, but people get out the GW Bush 'mission accomplished' banners a little early. The generation is the cheap and easy part. The rest is expensive and slow and needs way more focus than it's getting if we ever want to make progress in the west (China is already figuring it out)

comrade1234

Why don't they count pumped storage and batteries as renewable?

indubioprorubik

And thats not how good renewables are- thats how deindustrialized britain has become. And deindustrialization leads to debt slavery - and debt slavery either leads to passing on that bitter chalice to others (empire) or to becoming a colony.

jackpeterfletch

9.4% is Gas + Biomass (not clean) But there’s a generation surplus and export of +13.4%!

goldenarm

These titles are misleading, they always omit the rest of the grid and the final carbon footprint. In March, the UK emitted 161g CO2/kWh. France did 6 times less CO2/kWh with 2x less renewables ! https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/12mo/monthly

byteface

Yet still it costs several pounds a day to heat your home in winter. People are going back to log burners. I've never seen so much coal/wood sold at the supermarkets during winter. I've got some electric blankets which is great but really energy costs seem to be spiralling.

Havoc

This is great. Yes, plenty of challenges around this remain but the direction of travel is hugely positive. Bit more advances in grid scale storage, bit more interconnects and this looks real good

oybng

The landscape has been destroyed by wind turbines, and energy prices are higher than ever. lose lose.

Jemm

If by renewables you mean lumber from Canada, then sure.

djhworld

I'm on a electricity tariff where the per kWh unit price changes every 30 minutes, you're basically being charged at market rate or thereabouts, the prices for the next 28 hours are announced at 4pm every day. Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately. On really windy days you definitely get to see the benefit where prices drop to zero or even negative, which is great if you have an EV or something to dump lots of power into. Looking at todays prices they're like 1-3p p/kWh! But that doesn't last, as the wind dies things start to get back to normal. The key with the tariff though is to just play the averages and generally avoid high power usage during the peak periods. My average for the last 2 years was around 30% cheaper (p/year) than what I would have paid if I was on a normal energy tariff. It will be interesting to see whether that trend continues, especially with the state the world has suddenly been thrown into.

dana321

Yes, because its windy today

oulipo2

Really cool! Would be nice to have some explanatory legends at some locations, like for transfers (eg "Positive when GB -> x, negative when x -> GB")

fguerraz

Yes, if you count the Drax power plant as renewable, sure. If you add to that deindustrialization and buying everything from abroad and not caring where that energy comes from, it’s super easy.

sph

Related - world-wide map of energy generation: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig... Discussion (didn't seem to get much traction): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553165

xp84

Can people in Britain post their actual electricity rates per kWh? I want us Californians to be able to see how badly we are (or aren’t) being ripped off by our utilities compared to you (mind you, these rates are approved by our regulator). We’re basically told we have to pay this much because of our lovely renewables requirements (they’re still far from 90% renewable though). We are on a ‘time of use’ rate designed for EV charging at night. We are paying 26 cents (£0.20) except for 4-9PM when it’s 59 cents (£0.44). Plus a monthly base charge which they just increased.

DrBazza

Today is abnormally windy in the north of the country, and sunny, so this is not unexpected. By their own data, today is about 18GW for wind, and this time last week it was 3GW.

GartzenDeHaes

Good thing they won't be needing any of that LNG from the Gulf.