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One thing which has not been mentioned in this discussion is that the wholesale market price of power at any given time is substantially driven by the marginal

One thing which has not been mentioned in this discussion is that the wholesale market price of power at any given time is substantially driven by the marginal cost of generation. When renewables (including storage) can't take up the entire load of the system, that marginal generation is nowadays going to be gas power, and right now the global price of gas is unprecedentedly high. To simplify things somewhat; the larger the fraction of the time gas generation can be turned off, the lower the annualised price of electricity will be. At the moment, we are already seeing renewables taking up 100% of the load for short periods. As more renewable capacity gets built, those periods will get longer and longer, this effect will get ever larger. In some countries this effect is expected to become significant within the next five years, even at current rates of progress, and will only get better as time goes on. Lower annualised electrical prices will be good for the economy and the individual, and encouraging this should be a priority for any rational government which thinks more than a few years ahead.

testing22321 1y ago
>Lower annualised electrical prices will be good for the economy and the individual, and encouraging this should be a priority for any rational government which thinks more than a few years ahead. But it will be bad for profits for the private companies who generate power with gas who have been lobbying the government to the tune of billions of dollars to protect those very profits. Saving money for the consumer is the polar opposite of what these companies , and therefore the government wants.
- lambdaone 1y ago
  This is one of the things I was talking about when I said "simplifying". That's exactly their motivation, yes. Resisting it requires political will, or we will continue to let the increasingly irrelevant tail wag the dog. There is definitely a case for subsidising the existence of mostly-idle gas plants to make the costs of keeping them around profitable for the medium term (you can think of them roughly as playing the role of a battery), but indefinitely subsidising the equivalent of buggy-whip manufacturers is not a long-term solution for the economy.
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anonfordays 1y ago
>and right now the global price of gas is unprecedentedly high. Have a source for this? Zooming out, looking at gas prices over the past decade, "unprecedentedly high" isn't the term I would use: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/natural-gas https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/natural-gas

testing22321 1y ago

>Lower annualised electrical prices will be good for the economy and the individual, and encouraging this should be a priority for any rational government which thinks more than a few years ahead. But it will be bad for profits for the private companies who generate power with gas who have been lobbying the government to the tune of billions of dollars to protect those very profits. Saving money for the consumer is the polar opposite of what these companies , and therefore the government wants.

lambdaone 1y ago
This is one of the things I was talking about when I said "simplifying". That's exactly their motivation, yes. Resisting it requires political will, or we will continue to let the increasingly irrelevant tail wag the dog. There is definitely a case for subsidising the existence of mostly-idle gas plants to make the costs of keeping them around profitable for the medium term (you can think of them roughly as playing the role of a battery), but indefinitely subsidising the equivalent of buggy-whip manufacturers is not a long-term solution for the economy.

deleted 1y ago

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anonfordays 1y ago

>and right now the global price of gas is unprecedentedly high. Have a source for this? Zooming out, looking at gas prices over the past decade, "unprecedentedly high" isn't the term I would use: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/natural-gas https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/natural-gas