An Expensive day in April.

The 30th April 2017 was a Bank Holiday Sunday in the UK and consequently the use of electricity was very low.

By chance it is also a Goldilocks day for wind and solar. Not too much wind but windy enough to provide a high output. The icing on the cake was that the wind speed was pretty constant across the day. Solar meanwhile has a nice day too with cloudless skies.

The day has been lauded far and wide as the day the UK was supplied with more power by renewables than by all other sources combined. When averaged over the day, the subsidised renewables (wind, solar and biomass) contributed 41% of the total energy used.

I wondered how much this Goldilocks day cost the UK taxpayer in subsidies.

The Electric insights website (Here) gives us a lot of information.

Here is a snapshot of the full day of generation from 30th April.

Knowing a few of the details of the subsidy regimes and the average generation per technology over the day we can get a rough idea of how much this golidlocks day cost, both for actual electricity generated and for wind, solar and biomass subsidies.

All of existing RE generation (bar the shouting) is subsidised by the Renewables Obligation (RO) or for smaller generators by the Feed In Tariff (FiT). CfD's (contracts for difference) are yet to apply to operational generators, but they are unlikely to reduce the total cost by much (if anything).

Bear in mind  RO and FiT subsidies are NOT the full price. The fullprice is (subsidy + selling price).

Currently one ROC is worth £45.58

Interestingly the RO for ground level solar (1.2 ROC/MWh) is almost the same as the latest total FiT price (generation + export) for small arrays.  Which means I will assume all solar gets the same subsidy of 1.2 ROCs/MWh (actually this is an significant underestimate of the subsidy due to a number of reasons - but I'll use this to err on the side of caution with this rough calculation)

Large scale wind has two separate ROC subsidies - one for onshore (0.9 ROCs/MWh) and one for offshore(1.8 ROCs/MWh). Offshore is far more productive per turbine than onshore while there are more onshore turbines than offshore. So a happy medium is to place the average ROC subsidy at 1.35 per MWh( (onshore + offshore)/2)

There is also some embedded wind which is subject to the FiT scheme. But per MWh this works out at approximately the same level of subsidy as our average for on-shore and off-shore.

Roughly working out the subsidy per technology for this single Goldilocks day:

Wind. 
The average power output over the day for wind was 8.8GW So the total energy generated was (8.8 x 24) just over 210GWh. Our subsidy  per MWh is (1.35 x £45.58) or £61.53 per MWh. So the subsidy on 210GWH amounts to £12,921930.

That is (as near as dammit) £13 million for the day

Solar.
Obviously solar only works during daylight so although there was a glut at midday of around 5GW, when averaged over the day the output was a more modest 1.5GW or 36GWh. The subsidy cost is 1.2 ROCs per MWh.

That comes out roughly £2 million for the day.

Biomass
Biomass power averaged 1.4GW over the day producing 33GWh of energy. Biomass gets one ROC per MWh.

The subsidy for this single day was just over £1.5 million.

So the total subsidy was £16.5 million.

How does this compare with the total generation cost?

Now the average payment (ex-subsidy) for all generators over the day was £32.43 per MWh and the average total power was 28.4GW.  So the total cost (ex subsidy) for all the electricity generated (28.4 x 24 x 32.43) was about £22 million

Bear in mind that my back-of-a-fag-packet subsidy calculation of £16.5 million uses the latest (and smallest) FiT rates.

It is pretty clear that when you include the hidden ROC and FiT subsidies this single day of 41% penetration by Wind, Solar and Biomass came close to doubling the wholesale price of electricity.

Yet on this sunny, windy, and expensive day in April, there was also an elephant in the room.

It is an elephant whose name environmentalists dare not speak. An elephant that is shunned, ignored or pilloried.

That elephant is the UK's existing nuclear power fleet.

One that April day it continuously provided about 25% of our power or 7.3GW. It does this day in day out 24/7. Not just when there is a Goldilocks day.

There were no emissions and for existing nuclear, there are no subsidies.

The Coming Dark Age - Revisited

I did not know whether to laugh or cry when I read these articles in the Independent today (HERE) and (HERE) In these articles the outgoing head of OfGem moans about the looming "Energy Gap" and inevitable price hikes that are on their way. Evidently, we are now so far down the road the only option we have to potentially avert the crisis is to build gas plant using expensive imported gas.

Dare I point out that I first blogged about this in 2010 ( HERE ) and I was a long way from being the first. In the industry this has been an issue for the last 10 years. Both of the last governments (but particularly the last Labour administration) are guilty of letting this drift. Due to the time scales the looming energy supply catastrophe can only now be potentially offset by gas - whatever the cost.

That AND possibly keeping old and decrepit coal plant running.

What a state to get into.

All because vacuous politicians have preferred to pursue the fools gold of renewables and simultaneously shun new nuclear.

But nuclear companies are no different than any other large ruthless corporate entity. Worldwide today, it is a lucrative sellers market for nuclear manufacturers. So now, when we are at or past crisis point the politico's are being held to ransom. The nuclear companies are demanding their pound of flesh. What a turn around.

We are told that "power cuts are unlikely" This is almost certainly just more wishful thinking.
Our generation capacity is going to fall to almost parity to what is needed. Any outage is going to stretch things to breaking point. A large outage in a serious cold snap or a double break down is going to see serious and widespread blackouts.

What will the politico's do? I reckon they will try and wing it. They will hope for mild weather and no breakdowns. God help us all.

This is terrible.

All of that money! All of that national resource wasted on the useless unreliable wind. All of the prevarication and navel gazing over nuclear and shale gas. All of that "Do Nothing and Hope It goes away" attitude.

At best the end result will be a stretched and unreliable power supply dominated by ancient coal and expensive imported gas, with wind adding little but a feel good factor for the technically illiterate.

Of course there will a diminishing contribution from our old first generation nuclear plant as well.
Inevitably this is going to be forced into an ever extended lifespan and run flat-out just to save the asses of our great and good.

What a waste. What a scandal.

European Electricity Prices Compared

Here is a price comparison table from The European Energy Portal.

We can do a little analysis of relative electricity prices in Europe.

Highest prices are in  Denmark closely followed by Germany. France is the lowest in Western Europe and Bulgaria is the lowest overall.

• The Danish pay well over twice the price for their electricity compared to the French.
• The Germans pay 190% more for electricity than the French, i.e. nearly double.
• The Italians pay 49% more for their electricity than the French
• The Spanish pay 43% more for their electricity than the French. Half as much again.
• The British pay 12% more than the French.

It is interesting to correlate these price differences to installed generation capacity.

• The Danes are the world leaders per head of population in installed wind power. They also have, by far the most expensive electricity in Europe.
• Germany has the largest European installation of wind power. It is number two is this highest priced electricity in Europe
• Spain is close on Germany's heels for installed capacity. Their prices though are a little more reasonable, they are tenth in the price league table.
• Italy comes a poor third on total installed wind capacity but like the Spanish, they cough up half as much again as the French.

What does this tell us?

Well, I think that the overriding fact is that French Nuclear power (80% of French Electricity generation is nuclear) provides by far, the cheapest electricity in Europe.

Interestingly, the French have the fourth largest number of wind turbines in Europe but like Italy (No 3) and the UK (No 5) this number is about one quarter of that in Germany and Spain.

Compared to Denmark, France (like Italy and the UK) has less than one tenth of the installed number of turbines per head of population.

It would militate that when installed wind power capacity gets above a certain percentage, the price to the consumer sky-rockets. It also shows that wind power is the inflationary driver behind electricity price hikes all across Europe. Generally the more turbines per head of population, the higher your electricity bills are. French prices are driven low by nuclear. If they dispensed with their windmills then their prices would probably be even less.

But the above table contains another really disgraceful truth.

Compare the prices for all of the above nations for a low level user (left column) and a high level user (right column).

You will find that in most countries, including Denmark, Germany, Spain, France and the UK, the high level user gets a discount. In Western Europe, only Italy and the Netherlands charge more for profligate useage.

Surely, if we are trying to cut down on energy useage, we should stop having the smaller users subsidising the higher users.

In other words, why do we have pensioners and the thrifty, subsiding the extravagance of the well-off or careless?

Is that not basic common sense that we should reward energy thift, no punish it?
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[Note: 27/03/2014]
 Sadly, sometime in the last few months the European Energy Portal appears to have removed the comparison tables on national electricity and gas prices. It now only publishes comparison tables on petrol/diesel/lpg. I would suspect that the freely available data has been censored as it seriously undermined EU policy. As this post is now 3 years old I hope to update it in the near future when I identify another straight-forward source of pricing information. (red rags bulls and all that)
Regards Billo
[End Note]