Campbell was at the heart of the last Labour government when they came up with the Feed in Tariff.
This is why so many people in Britain think solar is cheap. Most people know someone who knows someone who got solar panels 20 years ago and claims to have been zero electricity bill ever since. In reality we have all been giving him free money to participate in an elaborate charade that solar power has value 50 - 58° from the Equator.
Campbell had long gone from the Labour Party when FiTs were introduced although its fair to say the roots of renewable targets started when he was still involved.
Laura - do you mean greenwash in the sense that they are deflecting attention to butterflies and birds, instead of reviewing the fundamentals of solar as an option?
The UK is not known to be very sunny - more known for fog and clouds and rain. Strange place to promote solar power. Sunlight is free, but it can't be bought. It will shine when it wants to, not necessarily when we want to. Winters are especially bad at the shortest days and longest nights. Solar is expensive. Going from 0.1% of the land to 1% means an increase of 10 times - when there are already many more panels than I'd like to see.
Reading the Telegraph article hyping Fuse and how they will be "different" and "more modern" than any other supplier was wild in the context of the recent Kraken sale.
Curious where you source your electricity price data from in Figure 2?
David does well to publish his anti-solar article right now, because his figures rely on the CfD AR7 solar PV strike price maxing up against the bid cap (which he doesn't tell you anywhere). However, within two weeks we will actually know for sure what the actual AR7 solar PV strike price is, because it will be published.
There are two significant things wrong with David's estimate of AR7 solar PV costs.
Firstly, solar PV CfD auction prices tend to come in significantly lower than the bid cap. For instance, David is quoting £72/MWh for AR6 CfD prices (in 2025 pounds), but the AR7 solar PV bid cap was £85/MWh (in 2024 pounds). So there is a stonking bid cap discount of 15% comparing actual prices to the bid cap.
If we get the same 15% discount on the bid cap for AR7 solar PV, in a couple of weeks, it should come in a decent 10-12% cheaper than AR6 solar PV, at maybe £65/MWh.
Secondly, David is not telling you what the "balancing costs" are. Most of the current balancing costs are "constraint" costs, caused by the excellent wind power installed in Scotland and the current transmission line constraints in transmitting it to the population centres in England.
While it is fair to add these to current offshore and onshore wind costs (until 2029 when the constraints will start to be relieved), it is a nonsense to add any of these constraint costs to solar PV prices. Who in there right mind installs a lot of solar PV farms in Scotland (which has such excellent wind)? No, the solar farms PV tend to be installed in Southern England, AND DO NOT SUFFER FROM the SCOTLAND ENGLAND GRID BOUNDARY CONSTRAINTS and subsequent balancing costs.
My estimate would be that solar balancing costs are closer to £6/MWh than £20/MWh. So that would bring down all the solar PV costs by £14/MWh.
Aside from those obvious flaws, there are more considerations.
1. The FIT and ROC subsidies are indeed large. But the 20 year contracts for them start dropping out in 2027. By 2036 they will all be gone and these wind and solar farms will be getting the wholesale price.
2. Tandem perovskite solar PV cells are starting volume production, but won't be used in bids for a while as they are not yet getting economies of scale. They bring typical solar panel efficiencies up from low 20%s now, to around 26%, with no increase in most of the balance of system costs. In other words, they will enable UK solar PV costs to drop within a couple of years.
Gas costs
David is not comparing apples with apples in contrasting gas and solar PV. Gas also has balancing costs, which he is not covering. Fossil fuel grids have significant balancing costs. So he should add maybe £6/MWh to gas costs for this.
David's gas fuel costs were only achievable in the last month, previously they would have been maybe £10/MWh higher.
David hasn't added the typical "spark spread" to the gas costs. The implication is that if gas is required to be, say 50% of supply, then the lower efficiency gas plants have to be activated, and the wholesale prices go up. In other words, ample wind power is keeping gas prices down by allowing only the higher efficiency gas plants to be activated. Maybe add another £10/MWh to the cost of gas plants had there been no wind power available.
All in all:-
A) There is a good case that gas power costs are over £100/MWh at times when there is little wind power available.
B) Total costs of solar PV from AR7 is highly likely to be at least £20/MWh cheaper than David's figures and shows that solar PV is indeed one of the cheapest sources of generation - even in the UK.
We won't see the results of AR7a that includes solar until 6th February. AR7 for offshore wind should be published 14th January. A reminder that solar was allocated in full at the ASP cap in AR5, and that the Pot1 auction includes a reserve for onshore wind which will limit the solar award. Some may bid in the hope that contracts will be re-written under REMA on more favourable terms, but equally they may be cautious given the public attitudes of the Tories and Reform: only having 2 years of operation at best before an election adds uncertainty.
The trend in prices has been mildly upward: in 2025 value we have gone from £65.89/MWh in AR4 through £67.34/MWh in AR5 to £71.74/MWh in AR6. I don't expect prices to be much different - possibly higher given rising curtailment risk. They are unlikely to undercut the ASP by much this time.
Most balancing costs are actually concerned with forecast error. Demand forecast error was the main source pre-renewables, with only occasional plant trips and some geographical rebalancing in the NETA/BETTA era, whereas the Pool allowed the Grid to avoid most of that. Demand forecast error remains surprisingly substantial, and is both national and regional (e.g. lights go on when the clouds come over). But added to it is forecast error on renewables output, which leads to the need to ramp up and down alternative supply. These errors are often much bigger than the underlying demand forecast errors often running to several GW, as weather systems fail to match forecast timings and intensities. It is true that plant trips/unexpected outages are now more common with the aged CCGT and nuclear fleet, and we now have to add interconnector trips and non availability (actually the most frequent source of significant frequency upsets). But renewables uncertainty is still a far bigger factor than CCGT/nuclear/biomass/interconnector trips, which add little to balancing costs overall.
Ramping to match varied solar output is a significant cost, some of it hidden from the Balancing Mechanism. For example, Little Barford has often been run ramping down and back up again to accommodate the solar peak in a perfect duck curve, with the contract agreed on a term basis. Solar balancing and system costs are only going to increase as they overload distribution grids: the new Open Balancing Platform and half hourly live metering will help see to that.
We will of course be stuck with all existing PV capacity even if perovskite becomes an economic proposition: on your forecast we would be unlikely to see any much before 2030, given the lead times for projects.
Most gas is actually sold in advance as hedges, so the actual cost paid will reflect the marginal hedge offer, which will be significantly down the merit order. If lower merit plant later buys in wind to cover its forward sale there is no benefit to a supplier from that. A top of merit order plant has lower costs. The average efficiency of gas generation can be deduced from official statistics: it's just under 50%, but that includes much lower efficiency OCGT being run for relatively few hours.
I disagree with your claim about gas cost. I looked at 16th December, where CCGT ran much of the day at over 20GW. The Market Index Prices remained just over £80/MWh for most of the day, reflecting gas cost and higher UKA carbon costs. The evening peak saw no increase in CCGT, with marginal sources being grid batteries, BritNed/NEMO interconnectors and pumped storage, which pushed the price to £110/MWh.
IDAU said "A reminder that solar was allocated in full at the ASP cap in AR5."
Sure - in AR5. But in AR6, the solar strike price was some 18% below the ASP cap (which rose by 30% vs AR5). The AR7 cap has been reduced by 11% vs the AR6 cap.
IDAU said "The trend in prices has been mildly upward: in 2025 value we have gone from £65.89/MWh in AR4 through £67.34/MWh in AR5 to £71.74/MWh in AR6. I don't expect prices to be much different - possibly higher given rising curtailment risk. They are unlikely to undercut the ASP by much this time."
The long term trend of solar PV prices is down, and recent global utility scale solar is also down in price. There is nothing obvious in the current UK policy or supply chain situation to cause prices to continue rising (as there is in the USA). So I would expect a gentle decline on the AR6 strike price.
We will see soon.
IDAU said "the Pot1 auction includes a reserve for onshore wind which will limit the solar award."
It will indeed limit the solar GW installed under AR7. However, the more limited the pot, the more the higher higher priced bids will be squeezed out, leaving lower priced bids.
IDAU said "Most balancing costs are actually concerned with forecast error. "
This shows the majority of balancing costs are constraint costs, not energy imbalances etc. £1.9bn of just over £2bn for financial year 2024/25. Electric insights says that 60% of balancing costs are constraint charges, but that these were overcharged in the past by £800m and roughly one third of this will be returned to electricity consumers each year.
IDAU says "they may be cautious given the public attitudes of the Tories and Reform: only having 2 years of operation at best before an election adds uncertainty."
Bring on Tory and Reform statements that they will dismantle the green progress under the current labour (and preceding conservative) governments, and not honour contracts signed by the current government. That would almost certainly ensure a solid loss for both Tory and Reform at the next general election. Likely, Sunak's backtracking on net zero measured resulted in 10s more Tory MPs losing their jobs in 2024 than need have been the case.
IDAU said "Ramping to match varied solar output is a significant cost, some of it hidden from the Balancing Mechanism. "
Grid batteries are being installed at a decent rate and are brilliant at reducing required CCGT ramp rates when the sun goes down.
IDAU said "A top of merit order plant has lower costs."
While this is true, it doesn't mean that the price these more efficient plants charge for advanced hedge sales is that much less than for the less efficient plants - just that the less efficient plants get contracts for a lower fraction of the time (but at a higher price). Much the same pricing mechanisms and levels will apply for the long term contracts for the more efficient plants as for the spot market - because the proportion of the time when the plants of the various efficiencies (in competition) get scheduled are the same whether you average the spot markets or roll it all up into a long term contract. Under the 2030 CPP, after the capacity payments, presumably everyone will get some sort of cost plus deal - it doesn't matter that much because operating costs for the remaining 5% supply from gas will be a much lower fraction of the total spend on CCGT, most of it going towards the capacity contracts.
IDAU said "I looked at 16th December, where CCGT ran much of the day at over 20GW. "
I would have thought there would be a significant start up (and shut down?) cost for CCGT and OCGT, so a guaranteed continuous run would enable lower gas plant prices.
IDAU said "The evening peak saw no increase in CCGT, with marginal sources being grid batteries, BritNed/NEMO interconnectors and pumped storage, which pushed the price to £110/MWh."
Or it could have been that biomass was the cheapest available generation once solar stopped generating. There is definitely a blip in the biomass use during the evening peak demand times in the chart at https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?start=2025-12-16&&_k=9kcmig. On the other hand, if you have access to the detailed bid pricing (seems unlikely due to commercial secrecy) you might be able to tell me biomass definitely wasn't the cause.
Biomass probably has similar price characteristics to CCGT/OCGT. No carbon costs, but likely higher fuel costs to compensate. Certainly the gas + biomass impact on wholesale prices might be similar to just gas. There seems to be around 3.8 GW of biomass on the transmission grid (likely bidding cheaper than higher efficiency CCGT) and thus visible, plus another 3 GW or so of mainly waste to energy, on the distribution grid, which presumably costs more to run, but maybe not as much as the less efficient gas in the last few GW of transmission connected gas capacity.
Presumably the root of forecasting error is the aggregate of all supplier and generators with NESO left to pick up the consequences? However, surely much of the balancing cost is hard wired in by the system eg windmills will submit their FPNs without a care on grid constraints and NESO will then have to adjust actual generation to match grid capacity. If REMA was to be of any worth it would address this fundamental issue with current mkt design but that would of course require all subsidy schemes to be redesigned so that wont happen and they will perpetuate this wholly inefficient approach.
No. NESO make their own forecasts of demand and renewables output, in addition to having sight of the overall contracted position via Elexon. They're not very good at it.
They've just taken on a PhD Met Office employee and signed a contract with them to try to improve. Some hope!
Others do it better. E.g. Amira, referenced in Kathryn Porter's piece.
Even hazier are their longer term forecasts for Future Energy Scenarios which display huge hopium biases.
The incentive of the Balancing Mechanism is to try to match your contracted position with actual supply ahead of gate closure for the most part, unless you are highly skilled at guessing which way "chasing the NIV" will go. If customer demand turns out to be higher than the volume purchased a retailer will pay BM system price on the shortfall, and likewise if a generator produces less it will be charged for the shortfall. Vice versa when there is a Net Imbalance Volume surplus. BM system prices are often highly volatile as you can usually see here
Under the SNP, Scotland has a target for 6GW solar installed by the end of the decade. It would be comical if we didn't all have to pay for this in our bills and lost amenity.
Presumably the CfDs for solar include constraints payments as per wind?
The rules for solar CFDs are the same as for wind. That is, they get compensation up to the strike price so long as the day ahead reference price is not negative. For negative prices no compensation is paid, so they have an incentive to self-curtail. This is determined on metered output, so they need to own a battery to benefit from using it for time shifting. The battery is still separately metered and separately dispatched by the Control Room in the Balancing Mechanism.
In addition they are subject to the same rules in the Balancing Mechanism, which means that the Control Room can act to alter their output based on submitted bids to curtail (or offers to increase if they have chosen self curtailment). So far solar farms have been too small to bother with: it's easier to curtail a wind farm than 10 solar farms. That is changing with larger transmission connected solar farms, and also the more automated processes for balancing already being implemented for grid batteries that are connected (like most solar) at distribution voltages rather than directly to the high voltage Transmission grid.
LB said "Presumably the CfDs for solar include constraints payments as per wind?"
Most Scottish solar generation does not take place at the same time as Scottish wind generation, so there are not likely to be significant constraint costs associated with Scottish solar.
UK wind power output (both onshore and offshore) is generally 50 to 100% higher in winter than in summer. Whereas solar PV output is roughly 5x as much in summer as in winter. 6 GW of Scottish solar by 2030 is also small beer compared to the 12 GW of Scottish onshore and offshore wind already installed.
So there will only be more solar than the network to England can cope with at times when the network is already busy with too much wind power, and both of these don't tend to happen at the same time.
The other thing we know about solar PV output is that all of it occurs during daylight hours. So adding batteries to smooth it over into the night time hours can spread it out over a much longer time (50% longer in summer and up to 200% longer in winter). Batteries are thus more synergistic with solar than with wind, whose ebbs and flows are less predictable.
So there will be far lower constraint payments associated with Scottish solar in summer - most of it can get thorough to the English grid with no problem as most of it will be generated at times when wind generation is lower than peak winter wind.
There is no real anti correlation of solar and wind output in Scotland. Higher outputs of solar occur across a wide range of wind outputs/export surpluses. The critical factor is output in the middle of the day. I ran a scatter plot of solar output against Scottish transfers to England which demonstrates this well. Since solar output in Scotland is even more seasonally peaked than further South, curtailment in high summer could be damaging to solar economics. Batteries (or pumped storage) simply add cost. Which facilities actually curtail depends on their subsidy and contract frameworks. Curtailment will still occur because it is not economic to prevent it.
p.s. I've just edited the numbers in my first response to your comment - the version you saw had a 4 month winter (including DJF+ March). I fixed it in the background spreadsheet. The 40% more constraint charges in winter rather than summer is right (rounded up from 38%).
In the post, somehow I must have changed the % correctly, but omitted to change the Spring and Winter constraint ££s totals to reflect the fixed spreadsheet. Anyway, it is fixed now.
If you total the GB constraint charges for 2024/25 financial year, the total for winter (DJF) is 40% more than the total for summer (JJA) - so there is significantly more curtailment in winter than in summer
Spring £392,480,786 - April to May 2024 + March 2025
- JJA 2025, wind 7.55 GW, solar 2.99 GW, total 10.54 GW
- D2024+JF 2025, wind 11.86 GW, solar 0.6 GW, total 12.66 GW
Further, the Google AI says wind and solar output are anti-correlated with a coefficient between -0.2 and -0.4 (Texas ERCOT grid is -0.23 from my detailed analysis of it). Most likely this is due to anti-cyclones which are periods in summer or winter where air is relatively still (isobars further apart) but clear.
IDAU said "Higher outputs of solar occur across a wide range of wind outputs/export surpluses. "
Of course they do - random chance guarantees that! The question is whether high solar output is skewed towards lower wind output or not.
IDAU said "I ran a scatter plot of solar output against Scottish transfers to England which demonstrates this well."
If you didn't do it for a 12 month period you may not get the right picture. Also, remember that while solar in summer may be a higher proportion of supply, to a first cut, the transmission links from Scotland to England have similar capacities in summer to winter (not quite - because the additional overhead line cooling in winter does allow higher powers).
Can you put the output on to Dropbox, with a (view only) link posted here?
IDAU "Since solar output in Scotland is even more seasonally peaked than further South, curtailment in high summer could be damaging to solar economics. "
Because wind output in winter (DFF) is 50% to 100% higher than in summer (JJA), then there is a significantly lower chance of solar curtailment in summer than in winter - for the period at which there is highest solar output. There's a marginal reduction in wind output during the day (vs night) too, but I didn't look at that by season.
IDAU said "Batteries (or pumped storage) simply add cost. "
Hardly, in a situation of highly fluctuating power prices by time of day, plus Scotland to England constraints. I reckon I could make a small profit at home from installing a Tesla Powerwall and enrolling for the Agile Octopus tariff - which has a significant reduction in export vs import tariffs. At a utility scale it should be much easier.
For instance, if you can make £20/MWh on storage, fully cycled each day, in 10 years that is £20 x 365 x 10 = £73,000 per MWh per decade, or £73 per kWh. Yet full BESS costs in China for the December 2024 PowerChina bid averaged $66/kWh or £50/kWh - likely coming to UK by 2030.
If you were going to get zero for significant times of curtailment alongside the normal peak/non peak power pricing, then the batteries hedge against that. Combine it with some sort of frequency response grid stability services contract and it is surely going to be worth it.
IDAU said "Which facilities actually curtail depends on their subsidy and contract frameworks. "
It doesn't matter what is curtailed. If paid anyway the NESO just swap additional CfD power costs for the same balancing curtailment costs - one way or another the power is paid for. If newer projects can't claim the CfD strike price for curtailment, then bids will be higher in the first place to compensate. Better to pay for curtailed power anyway, and fix the transmission constraints as soon as possible (with EGL1 through 5).
IDAU said "Curtailment will still occur because it is not economic to prevent it."
Very true - if you had zero curtailment you are investing too early and paying too high annual charges for transmission line upgrades. Having said that, there is no excuse for not contracting for EGL1 and EGL2 when the requirement became clear some years ago - incompetence.
See my comment above. The saving comes from sharing the grid connection charges that are based on maximum declared export volumes since the battery won't usually be discharging when solar output peaks, but otherwise they are separately metered and dispatched.
However, the best locations in Scotland are only a little worse than the worst locations in Germany, and permitting, land and labour costs in Scotland are all likely to be lower than in England. So it all depends on costs up there.
Ive no doubt you can cut the numbers up another way and they will equally stand up to scrutiny but fundamentally when its dark solar panels are of no use and a funny thing is that happens every day come what may. So solar at best is helping to reduce the amount of gas we use but won't eliminate it. Indeed NESO stated that 35GW needed to be retained and Miliband has accepted that so DENZ are now consulting to add a new higher priced tier to the capacity mkt to incentivise new build gas. In the context of the NZ goal at least its recognised that we need a fairly big chunk of gas generation to act as standby but how much does it cost to have effectively close to two generation systems in place?
The other thing about solar is its screwing the wholesale price badly in high summer now which is fine for those on subsidy regimes as they still get paid whatever the price. This gives a lovely arbitrage play for batteries but none of it helps the end consumer who is expected to bankroll all of this. Miliband has never been truly honest about how much net zero will cost. So much for the integrity that Labour said it was bringing to British politics.
N said "when its dark solar panels are of no use and a funny thing is that happens every day come what may. "
If you add 4 hours of batteries to solar PV farms, then you can indeed spread out the solar power to supply load after dusk. UK solar PV output is 5x as much in summer as in winter, and the 4 hours of batteries can spread this into the summer evening peaks and beyond. Note that during summer PV generates during most of the day, which reaches around 16 hours, leaving only 8 hours of night.
UK wind output is generally 50% to 100% higher in winter than in summer, so UK solar and wind are synergistic and you need both to minimise the gaps to be filled by the combination of short duration batteries and (long duration) backup CCGT.
N said "Solar at best is helping to reduce the amount of gas we use but won't eliminate it. "
What you say is true in the UK, but not in most of the world. Most of the world's population lives in much sunnier places, where a considerable proportion of peak demand is due to air conditioning. Further, peak air conditioning demand is guaranteed to be on days where solar PV output is high, as both are dependent on clear, sunny days. Solar plus 4 hours of batteries smooths the daytime generation into the evening to cope with the residual air conditioning load there.
So solar + 4 hours of batteries DOES reduce the required capacity of gas generation in most places, though not in the UK. And it won't completely eliminate the need for gas plants, just reduce the number needed in most places.
N said "In the context of the NZ goal at least its recognised that we need a fairly big chunk of gas generation to act as standby but how much does it cost to have effectively close to two generation systems in place?"
The existing 27 GW of UK gas has 2029 capacity contracts for £60/kW-year, which totals £1.6bn/year. The additional 8 GW needs something £90/kW-year for a 15 year contract, which would be £0.7bn/year. So the total cost of 35 GW of gas backup alongside solar and wind supplying most of the power will be around £2.3bn/year. This isn't excessive. This is roughly 1/3rd of the cost of ROC subsidies right now, but contracts start to expire in 2027 and will all be gone by 2036.
N said "effectively close to two generation systems in place?"
Depending on how you count it, you could call it three - backup gas, wind and solar. Wind and solar are complementary - wind generates more in winter and solar more in summer, so you need both.
But, as mentioned above, the costs are not excessive.
N said "The other thing about solar is its screwing the wholesale price badly in high summer now which is fine for those on subsidy regimes as they still get paid whatever the price. This gives a lovely arbitrage play for batteries but none of it helps the end consumer who is expected to bankroll all of this. "
Surely, if wholesale electricity prices are low or negative in high summer, this means the consumer is paying less. Batteries are not that expensive either. UK may need something like 280 GWh eventually, and the price in China is now around $66/kWh, so this would be around £14bn capital cost or around £1.5bn annualised costs. V2G/V2x may allow EV batteries to be mainly used. UK is likely to have around 2.8 TWh of EV batteries eventually. If 25% of EV owners allowed their EV batteries to be cycled by the grid between 100% and 50% (no lower), this would provide roughly what is needed, likely at much cheaper costs.
N said "Miliband has never been truly honest about how much net zero will cost."
He has made statements of possible savings, and none of these are out of court based on all the back of the envelope calculations I do. The key thing is surely that £7bn/year of ROC (and another £1.7bn/year of FIT) subsidies will be gone by 2037, and none of the gas backup capacity contract or battery costs come anywhere close to the total sum of £8.7bn.
Ignoring the cost to the earth of clawing all the raw materials out of the ground to make solar panels it makes eminent sense to deploy them at scale in equatorial regions and with batteries. In AR6 10 sites were awarded a CfD in Scotland vs c80 sites in England & Wales tells you what solar developers think.
The question isn't whether solar in England is better than solar in Scotland.
The question is whether solar PV in Scotland can be built to deliver a power cost lower than the strike price of the CfD AR7 solar auction.
Land and labour prices in Scotland are likely to be lower than in England and Wales, with far more land for fewer people. Permitting in Scotland is likely to be far easier too.
The economics of 4 hour batteries for solar are challenging. They only really are of use in the sunnier summer months - about 5 months a year - which immediately reduces the number of opportunities to make a round turn profit. With the large volumes of battery projects in the pipeline, batteries are going to struggle to make money. They will need to have several strings to their bows.
It is interesting to note that the Cleve Hill BESS is only 150MW/300MWh for a 373MW solar farm. - i.e. 40% of MW and only 2 hour duration. We can presume they did their sums, including the opportunity to tap into local offshore wind such as Kentish Flats.
IDAU said "Cleve Hill BESS is only 150MW/300MWh for a 373MW solar farm. - i.e. 40% of MW and only 2 hour duration."
Original plans for Cleve Hill had 700 MWh of batteries (~2 hours of nameplate solar output).
IDAU said "The economics of 4 hour batteries for solar are challenging. They only really are of use in the sunnier summer months - about 5 months a year."
That is not true. There's a big price differential between peak hour wholesale prices and overnight prices in winter. As long as the solar storage can charge from the grid as well, there is money to be made in time shifting, and the later afternoon/evening peak is around 4 hours.
I reckon I could probably make money out of trading power in winter with a Tesla powerpack on the Agile Octopus retail scheme, and that must discount export prices heavily. See https://agile.octopushome.net/dashboard . If that is true of retail time shifting, then it must be much easier for utility scale time shifting with no export discount.
The point surely is that the optimal battery MWh depends on the cost of batteries, which is coming down rapidly. Likely the appropriate metric (as ever) is the cost per cycle.
I imagine that the owners of Cleve Hill are smarter at the economics than you. Whether a longer duration battery can be traded profitably depends on the duration of adequately differentiated prices to make a margin on the round trip. There are many sites where estimates of optimal battery duration can be found, which also make projections of the future. Most projections suggest that battery margins will come under pressure from overcapacity and competition, with only the best located ones able to produce a viable trading strategy.
The Octopus tariff is designed to recover costs through charging high prices for peak hours consumption: it is set by them, and not by competition. By extending the hours of peak pricing they make it hard to evade higher prices for most on the tariff. Batteries are already finding competition among themselves and with gas fired generation limit the margin opportunities.
Longer duration storage projects are being lined up for subsidies: e.g. the pumped storage projects on the Great Glen, CAES etc.
15 paragraphs of clutching at straws. The Dunkelflautes which will bring the economy to ruin can last for days or even weeks in cold dark midwinter when power is needed most. Most BESS installations are money-grafting projects with only about an hours-worth of capacity. During a severe midwinter Dunkelflaute it is unlikely that these battery systems will be able to supply a period of peak demand then re-charge as well as keeping everything else running before the next period of peak demand.
DB said "The Dunkelflautes which will bring the economy to ruin can last for days or even weeks in cold dark midwinter when power is needed most."
The UK 2030 CPP retains all 27 GW of existing transmission connected gas plants, with a plan to add another 8 GW. Thus the CPP is proof against any durations of dunkeflautes. So the economy doesn't get ruined.
DB said "Most BESS installations are money-grafting projects with only about an hours-worth of capacity. "
The most recent installed BESS capacity seems to be 2 hours at the moment. There is, as yet, no specification for the duration of the 23-27 GW of BESS targeted in the CPP. It needs to be somewhere between 4 and 6 hours.
DB said "It is unlikely that these battery systems will be able to supply a period of peak demand then re-charge as well as keeping everything else running before the next period of peak demand."
There's generally 18 to 20 hours between consecutive evening peaks - plenty of time to recharge.
The criterion moves from CCGT backup needing to supply peak hour demand (less other firm generation such as nuclear, Drax) to needing to supply the average of the peak 24 hour demand (less other firm generation).
So, under the brave new 2030 CCP we will have ample gas-fired generation to withstand a prolonged Dunkelflaute? I very much doubt it. The existing fleet is mostly very old and the current procurement time on new builds is said to be at least eight years due to sky-high global demand.
But if the CCGT capacity were sufficient, what on earth is the point of building a hugely expensive parallel generation network of very expensive, not at all "green", insecure, unsustainable, weather-dependent, low energy density, highly-dispersed windmills and solar panels requiring massive landscape-despoiling pylon and interconnection infrastructure and lots of expensive BESS?
It is clear after more than 20 years of the climate change hoax that CO2 emissions have negligible impact on the global climate, and even if the fraudulent UN IPCC CO2 global warming hypothesis were true, unilateral UK Net Zero is utterly pointless while the majority rest of the world carries on with fossil fuel business as usual.
You should watch John Constable’s 45-minute lecture (starting at 1:25) describing how reliance on such low grade energy is the road to national ruin, sadly already well travelled by the delusional UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYHRngcYyB8.
PS: There are morning peaks as well as evening peaks, especially in cold, dark midwinter.
DB said "So, under the brave new 2030 CCP we will have ample gas-fired generation to withstand a prolonged Dunkelflaute? I very much doubt it."
The logical flaw in your thinking is that, somehow, adding more wind and solar power makes the grid less capable of handling a prolonged Dunkelflaute.
Since we are keeping all the existing gas fired generation, and it will be some time before demand from heat pumps take off, it follows that the CPP configuration will be just as capable of handling a prolonged Dunkelflaute as it is today. In fact, more so, because battery storage is being added all the time, and this enables peak demand in the absence of wind and solar to be met with the combination of more batteries + gas plants, the batteries being charged by starting the gas plants early.
DB said "The existing fleet is mostly very old and the current procurement time on new builds is said to be at least eight years due to sky-high global demand."
There has been no reservations raised about the existing gas fleet being unreliable.
DB said "But if the CCGT capacity were sufficient ..."
If won't be sufficient once UK heat pumps start to become a real thing - from 2035 (?? guess). But it can service a higher peak hour demand if batteries are installed alongside it.
DB said "what on earth is the point of building a hugely expensive parallel generation network of very expensive, not at all "green", insecure, unsustainable, weather-dependent, low energy density, highly-dispersed windmills and solar panels requiring massive landscape-despoiling pylon and interconnection infrastructure and lots of expensive BESS?"
The total per MWh costs (including annualised capital contribution) of wind and solar are lower than those of gas plants, especially once you include the carbon costs. And power from wind and solar invariably get cheaper over the long term, though Putin and others are capable of causing blips to the downward progress.
The fact wind and solar are weather dependent does not make them unreliable. With 8 hours of grid batteries for short duration gaps and existing gas plants for longer duration gaps, the variable power from wind and solar can readily be firmed up to meet UK variable demand.
The UK requirement for solar PV power is likely to take no more than 2% of land (and not the most fertile land at that). Further, most of the wind power will be generated by offshore wind - most of which will be out of sight of land. It is thus a gross exaggeration to claim "massive landscape despoiling". Nor are pylons actually seen as despoiling the landscape by those living within sight of them - house prices tend to go down when a new line of pylons is planned, then go up again when it is completed.
Grid batteries are significantly cheaper than gas peaker plants now. Gas peakers are probably around $1.5m/MW, while December 2024 prices for PowerChina BESS capacity came at $66/kWh, so a total of 1 MW, 8 hours would be 8 MWh and would be roughly $550k/MW - or about one third of the cost of gas peakers. Yes it will take a few years for such prices to work their way over here, but the writing is already on the wall for gas peakers.
DB said "It is clear after more than 20 years of the climate change hoax that CO2 emissions have negligible impact on the global climate"
On BBC Radio 4 this morning, More or Less checked with the experts on climate, and apparently we in the UK get 10% more rain in winter than we used to. That is why some people call it "global weirding", instead of "global warming". See https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p0msf6qd.
DB said "unilateral UK Net Zero is utterly pointless while the majority rest of the world carries on with fossil fuel business as usual."
That would indeed be the case if the biggest polluters were doing nothing. But since 2023, China has installed more wind and solar than the rest of the world put together, and it is now resulting in a small reduction in Chinese grid coal use and CO2 emissions, despite Chinese demand rising by over 5%.
And China is also selling over 55% new BEVs + PHEVs now. It has been over 50% for around 18 months now. It is 2-3 years in front of even the UK, which came in at 32.2% BEVs + 11.6% PHEVs total 43.8% in December 2025 - and on track to be over 50% plug ins by the end of 2026. See https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/
China is responsible for 30% of global CO2 emissions. But by 2035, on current trends, it is expected to have lower total emissions than the USA.
So it is now NOT true that UK is on its own. China takes climate change very seriously indeed, putting UK and everyone else to shame with its actions to address its own emissions (despite how hard it is when GDP and electricity demand grow by 5% or more each year). Pro rata to population vs China, UK should be installing 20 GW of wind and solar each year, and it is not yet anywhere close to that.
DB said "You should watch John Constable’s 45-minute lecture (starting at 1:25) describing how reliance on such low grade energy is the road to national ruin"
Isn't this guy a proven climate denier? If he doesn't accept we need to address climate change, then the rest of his "information" is also likely to be skewed to supporting the fossil fuel industry irrespective of the actual facts.
DT said "Copper prices up and silver prices 2.5X prices this time last year. "
Aluminium is a good substitute for copper as a high current conductor. And copper and aluminium are reasonable substitutes for silver for solar cell interconnections.
DT said "Chinese suppliers losing money."
Sure, but western solar PV panel manufacturing costs are coming down. Further, tandem perovskite panels increasing efficiency by 25% or so will inevitably reduce total system costs, even if the panels are more expensive.
DT said "Cost of UK labour rising because increased NI."
Routine installation and wiring of solar farms is surely something that AI robots should find straightforward. Similarly, they can do the occasional solar panel cleaning.
DT said "If we used more gas, that would support investment in newer, more efficient power plants."
The capital cost of gas plants has more or less doubled, because of the fear of increased AI data centre load has the industry gripped. Waiting lists have gone to something like 3 years to obtain new CCGT plant. Personally I think the data centre demand increase is over-hyped, but we will see. Given the capital cost increase, it seems unlikely that anyone is going to invest in new plant when an old one still works. Further, under the 2030 Clean Power plan, gas is expected to supply no more than 5% of UK demand, which means gas plant utilisation will be much lower than at present. So there is even less incentive to install a new gas plant.
DT said "The total balancing costs in the calculation above are already adjusted down by £750m to account for balancing costs before intermittent renewables."
Isn't that the same thing as saying balancing of gas plants should also have a share of the £750m allocated to them?
Further, if you have taken off the £750m, then the balancing cost of solar would be much lower than the £6/MWh I estimated - more like £2/MWh.
What would be better is to add in a couple of hours of batteries to solar costs to remove some of the required balancing functions, though these bring cost benefits to all generation types.
For instance, if UK had 280 GWh of batteries, it could have less gas plant capacity than the peak hour demand, because the batteries could be charged in advance of peak hour, which could then be supplied by a lower capacity of gas plants plus discharging batteries. You could reduce "enough gas plants to satisfy peak hour" down to "enough gas plants to satisfy the average demand over the peak 24 hours".
So you suggest "For instance, if UK had 280 GWh of batteries, it could have less gas plant capacity than the peak hour demand, because the batteries could be charged in advance of peak hour" is fine in the summer but in mid winter its not going to work which is why we need to keep 35GW of gas plant.
NESO today forecast 49GW for evening peak. So lets pick worst case with low wind dark night where's that coming from. 35GW CCGTs (not sure we have that now by the way) leaves 14GW which if we are lucky Hinckley can give 3.4, Sizewell B another 1.8 and the tree burners another 4GW. So thats 5GW from interconnectors?. Not today me old son as our so called expensive gas is in high demand from Europe even the French i/c is on export.
Thus we are going to need those two systems for sometime yet. But it gets worse as we now need basically a second grid to move the renewable power to where its needed so thats a lot of infrastructure to fund and maintain. You could see some rationale to that argument if the energy produced was going to be very cheap as promised but its not so economically it doesn't make sense.
N said' "For instance, if UK had 280 GWh of batteries, it could have less gas plant capacity than the peak hour demand, because the batteries could be charged in advance of peak hour" is fine in the summer but in mid winter its not going to work which is why we need to keep 35GW of gas plant.'
Sure you need to calculate against annual peak demand for GB, not against an average summer day.
Nuclear 5.2 GW (6.4 GW when Sizewell C replaces Sizewell B supposedly) "Biomass" includes burning of waste and is nearly 7 GW altogether. See the "Installed capacity" and [Note 1] around half way down https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/?p=2570.
Total non-gas firm generation 13 GW. 49 GW less 13 GW is 36 GW, so 36 GW of gas plants + charged batteries will be needed.
N said "35GW CCGTs (not sure we have that now by the way)"
The normally quoted figure is 27 GW of transmission connected CCGT/OCGT. 35 GW assumes the NESO contracts for another 8 GW with capacity contracts. There is more in distribution networks and private, which can be called on at much higher cost.
N said "So thats 5GW from interconnectors?"
Interconnectors shouldn't be counted for energy security connections. But they can be used instead of higher priced generators to lower wholesale and consumer costs.
N said "We now need basically a second grid to move the renewable power to where its needed so that's a lot of infrastructure to fund and maintain. "
Second grid? Hardly. There needs to be some expansion of the current grid to cope with offshore wind and the better generation in Scotland, but most of the grid network is dependent only on demand, not on how it is supplied.
And, although the grid will end up larger, that will eventually be supporting a significantly higher demand.
Journalist Will Jones recently published (can’t find the link) how much money he makes, paid for by the rest of us, from his Feed-in-Tarriff home solar panels.
Thanks to “useful idiot” plonkers like Campbell and Stewart, the UK continues remorselessly down the Net Zero road of wrecking our energy infrastructure and thence our entire economy by rolling out very expensive, not at all "green", insecure, unsustainable, weather-dependent windmills and solar panels.
Meanwhile, the USA is close to a breakthrough on building a commercial nuclear fusion power plant which will leave Net Zero ideologues trailing in the dust: https://brianlantz.substack.com/p/fusion-now.
Nuclear fusion is said to be 'close', but so far it has never produced a single Watt that didn't take more energy put in than gotten out - so don't hold your breath on that.
I looked up the current solar FiT rates just recently. The top rate for domestic solar is £743.70/MWh. Even puts tidal stream on 5 ROC/MWh worth ~£375 in subsidy in the shade!
Stewart is an Oxford PPE graduate, Campbell is a Cambridge modern language grad. In other words both know the square root of FA about electricity but an awful lot about sounding like they do. That is for me the whole problem with British politics- dominated by people who all think/talk the same on the left and right.
The solar industry gets a lot of mileage out of those claims that solar is “cheap.” Generally such claims are generally based on 1) higher capacity factors than are realistic in a place like the UK and 2) the pretense that solar is replacing other energy sources rather than displacing them. I encounter the same claims here in upstate NY in the US as well. Our suitability for solar is a little better than the UK’s, but we still have LOTS of cloud and snow cover to contend with. Capacity factors for smaller utility-scale solar (5-10 MW plants) average about 11.5% in my neck of the woods. Yet I’m seeing developers claim over 20% when promoting projects—and see them do the same in the UK. It’s absurd. No one challenges the narrative with real numbers for a specific geography. There are real differences in things like land costs and capacity factors.
I checked out NESO's data on Historic Demand that also includes embedded solar generation and capacity per half hour for 2025. Given the trumpeting about it having been the sunniest year on record I was surprised that the average capacity factor worked out at only 10.3%.
Plotting the data and summarising it to daily outputs revealed no obvious data glitches. It's basically almost identical to the Sheffield Solar PV numbers.
KM said "the pretense that solar is replacing other energy sources rather than displacing them."
The distinction here surely requires explanation.
KM said "I encounter the same claims here in upstate NY in the US as well. Our suitability for solar is a little better than the UK’s, but we still have LOTS of cloud and snow cover to contend with. Capacity factors for smaller utility-scale solar (5-10 MW plants) average about 11.5% in my neck of the woods. Yet I’m seeing developers claim over 20% when promoting projects."
The Google AI comes up with:-
New York State's utility-scale solar capacity factors vary regionally, with averages around 15-18% statewide, but showing higher rates (closer to 22%) in sunnier areas like Long Island compared to lower rates (around 13-14%) upstate
So you can both be right, but about different locations within New York state. There are surely solar maps for NY which would give you a better feel for the different locations.
KM said "And see them do the same in the UK."
I've never seen any claim for more than an 11% UK solar capacity factors, though you might even do better than this in South Western and Eastern England.
KM said "There are real differences in things like land costs"
The good news is that tandem perovskite solar cells are coming and likely to boost solar efficiencies from low 20%s (with silicon solar cells) to around 26% for current production ramping up. The implication is that the same area (with the same land costs) can generate maybe 25% more power with tandem perovskite. The technology itself is likely to provide even higher efficiencies over time.
And that is why we can confidently predict solar PV prices will continue to fall - panels are a small part of the overall cost nowadays.
My understanding is that Oxford PV has started manufacturing of tandem perovskite on silicon panels. The press release at https://www.oxfordpv.com/press-releases/oxford-pv-solar-technology-patent says it is manufacturing "at MW scale" tandem solar PV panels at 24.5% efficiency, with 26.9% in the offing.
MW scale is not enough - we need GW scale. But you do have to start somewhere.
Well. not wanting to lower the tone of the discussions but one of Polanski‘s previous fortes was hypnotherapy, in one newsworthy session he offered to help a woman increase the size of her breasts and change her body shape……He should’ve hypnotised Stewart not to ask uncomfortable questions.
There was a very recent interview between Stewart and Polanski. Stewart started by saying that he wanted to get an idea of Polanski's grip on 'the numbers'. His first question was "How big is the National Debt?". Polanski waffled, he obviously didn't know. After further questions it became apparent that Polanski didn't know the difference between National Debt and The Deficit. So I'm surprised that Stewart would consider voting green.
Let’s be honest here for one moment- Honesty and Campbell are complete strangers- Campbell is famous for his ability to twist half baked facts and display incredulity when the dossier that “proves” these half baked facts leads to a war in which not only British & American soldiers die, but hundreds of thousands of innocents- “nothing to do with me”!
Campbell reminds you of the Cheshire Cat in Alice. The Cheshire Cat famously tells Alice, "We're all mad here," and that she must be mad because she came to Wonderland. He also notes he is "not all there himself".
As for Rory, well the least said the better, but as a foil for Campbell he is a failure.
Let us be honest here for one moment. The failure of Rory as a politician seems to have been due mainly to the fact that he was too honest and couldn't bring himself to parrot some of the statements of the conservative party about Brexit which deviated too far from the known facts.
I would have thought the two would have made perfect foils for each other. Not that I have ever viewed the podcast.
The UK electorate and particularly Ogfem are living in la la land and have been for decades. Liz Truss could have righted the ship but she was crucified for her proposed policies by both houses.
If someone is as naive as Liz Truss about how UK's finances actually work, then it doesn't seem likely they would have the nous to tackle any other areas either - and particularly energy which is notoriously complicated.
Truss was brought down by the BofE and its engineered crisis that broke due to Pension Fund mismanagement
The Mechanism of the Crisis
The "banking problem" was not a failure of traditional banks themselves, but a systemic vulnerability within the UK's defined benefit pension schemes, which used a strategy called Liability-Driven Investment (LDI).
LDI Strategies: For years, encouraged by regulators, many pension funds used LDI strategies, often with leverage (borrowed money), to manage their long-term liabilities by investing heavily in UK government bonds, known as gilts. This strategy worked well in an era of low, stable interest rates.
The Mini-Budget Trigger: On September 23, 2022, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced £45bn of unfunded tax cuts without an accompanying independent forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Markets lost confidence in the government's ability to manage its finances, causing the value of the pound to fall and the price of gilts to drop sharply (and their yields to spike).
Margin Calls and the "Doom Loop": The rapid fall in gilt prices triggered "margin calls" on the leveraged LDI positions. Pension funds were forced to urgently sell more gilts to raise cash and meet these calls. This fire sale drove gilt prices even lower, triggering more margin calls, creating a "doom loop" that threatened the solvency of several funds.
Bank of England Intervention: The situation became a financial stability crisis, as a failure of the pension funds could have caused wider bankruptcies among lending banks. The Bank of England had to intervene with an emergency program to buy up to £65 billion worth of long-dated gilts to stabilize the market and prevent a systemic collapse.
There is nothing wrong with LDI per se; it is a strategy (as the words suggest) of matching the assets of a DB scheme as precisely as possible to the liabilities, both as regards quantum and timing. It is entirely appropriate for a DB scheme in run-off, which almost every private sector DB scheme is. The portfolio becomes wholly a mixture of gilts, high quality corporate bonds and longevity swaps to manage the parts of the liability curve where there are no bonds of appropriate duration available. The portfolio is never traded but held to maturity with the cash flows from coupons and maturities paying the liabilities as they fall due. The scheme becomes immune to interest rate risk, as any change in the value of the bond portfolio caused by a change in market yields is matched by a corresponding change in the value of the liabilities, keeping both sides of the fund balanced. It is the ultimate in prudent management.
The problem that broke out was not LDI, but the overlay of gearing, which you reference. Because most pension schemes were not fully funded a perfect LDI strategy wasn’t (and isn’t possible); you can’t match your assets perfectly to your liabilities if you don’t have enough assets! Pension scheme deficits are nothing new; traditionally they are addressed by recovery schemes involving additional pension contributions from the employer. But when schemes are legacy history sponsoring employers have greater and greater reluctance to shell out more money to address historic issues. The “solution” was therefore to use some of the very long dated gilts as collateral to borrow money to buy equities, the dividends and growth from which would plug the deficit with minimal need for employer contributions. What the actuaries at the pension consultancies which arranged the structures didn’t anticipate was movements on long term yields as dramatic as actually occurred, resulting in falls in the value of the collateral, margin calls and the need to sell bonds which weren’t intended ever to be sold to meet the calls. Which of course caused a market spiral.
The problem was entirely caused by breaching the general advice to any investor: don’t borrow to invest in equities! The problem was not LDI. Without the gearing it didn’t matter if long dated assets fell in value as, with perfect liability matching, the net present value of the liabilities would reduce pari passu.
It was all about bonds. ZIRP and QE purchases inflated bond prices and lowered yields which reduced annuities based on gilts. Leveraged Debt Instruments are financial derivatives that pay out a multiple of nominal yield at the time of purchase in exchange for accepting capital losses risk on a multiple of nominal capital collateral. When ZIRP ended the capital losses on long dated low coupon gilts were extreme.
We are seeing the effects in the massive losses on the BoE QE portfolio as well, adding to debt to be financed.
But not relevant to final salary pension schemes. Absent the gearing resulting in forced sales of long dated gilts to meet margin calls, trustees were indifferent to the falls in the value of bonds whose known inward cash flows through to maturity matched, in a perfect LDI strategy, the outward cash flows to pay pensions. The solvency of the fund was unchanged as, while the assets fell in value, the NPV of the liabilities fell pari passu when discounted at the higher yield of the matched bonds.
The crisis was caused by borrowing to buy equities using the long dated bonds as collateral.
I bumped into Rory at a social event in Scotland a couple of years ago. Never met him before but had heard the recent interview that R&A held with Dieter Helm. Dieter explained the utter nonsense of the Government’s approach to NetZero. This sent Campbell into conniptions. Rory made a half hearted attempt to support his guest (who he has huge respect for) while also seeking to avoid a beating from his co-host.
Then came the interview with Emma Pinchbeck- a talking head for the utterly clueless CCC. That suits Campbell who wants to think that Milliband is pursuing a sensible strategy; Rory (like AC) simply doesn’t know what questions to ask. Nor does Emma Pinchbeck. She just delivers the lines she is given by the CCC.
Back to that encounter with Rory up at Perth….. I asked him why he doesn’t bring on someone like Kathryn Porter of Watt-Logic to explain what’s going on in UK energy. Sorry David, I didn’t know who you are back then. In any case Kathryn has never been on the show - presumably vetoed by Alastair. They are way out of their depth…..
Stewart did sound like he was having a damascene moment over NZ in late summer maybe after the Dieter Helm episode. They started doing what is nothing but advertising for Fuse energy couched to sound as though its just the pair of them discussing any other topic. So its no wonder they've veered to CC/NZ again otherwise there sponsor wouldn't be too happy.
PBMD said "Dieter explained the utter nonsense of the Government’s approach to NetZero."
Helm has blind spots. There is always something missing from his analyses. Personally I think he just tries to be too black and white without thinking or crunching all the numbers. He is best ignored unless you need someone to act as a "devil's advocate" - forcing you to address all the issues before reaching a conclusion.
It's useful to listen to all perspectives on a variety of issues. But, yes, those two... oh my goodness
Campbell was at the heart of the last Labour government when they came up with the Feed in Tariff.
This is why so many people in Britain think solar is cheap. Most people know someone who knows someone who got solar panels 20 years ago and claims to have been zero electricity bill ever since. In reality we have all been giving him free money to participate in an elaborate charade that solar power has value 50 - 58° from the Equator.
Campbell had long gone from the Labour Party when FiTs were introduced although its fair to say the roots of renewable targets started when he was still involved.
RSPB also sell buckets of greenwash to highly leveraged solar speculators
https://members.rspb.org.uk/panels-and-pollinators/
Laura - do you mean greenwash in the sense that they are deflecting attention to butterflies and birds, instead of reviewing the fundamentals of solar as an option?
The UK is not known to be very sunny - more known for fog and clouds and rain. Strange place to promote solar power. Sunlight is free, but it can't be bought. It will shine when it wants to, not necessarily when we want to. Winters are especially bad at the shortest days and longest nights. Solar is expensive. Going from 0.1% of the land to 1% means an increase of 10 times - when there are already many more panels than I'd like to see.
Reading the Telegraph article hyping Fuse and how they will be "different" and "more modern" than any other supplier was wild in the context of the recent Kraken sale.
Curious where you source your electricity price data from in Figure 2?
Various sources.
Gas from Ember.
Market prices, subsidies and strike prices for CfDs from LCCC.
ROCs and FiTs from Ofgem
David does well to publish his anti-solar article right now, because his figures rely on the CfD AR7 solar PV strike price maxing up against the bid cap (which he doesn't tell you anywhere). However, within two weeks we will actually know for sure what the actual AR7 solar PV strike price is, because it will be published.
There are two significant things wrong with David's estimate of AR7 solar PV costs.
Firstly, solar PV CfD auction prices tend to come in significantly lower than the bid cap. For instance, David is quoting £72/MWh for AR6 CfD prices (in 2025 pounds), but the AR7 solar PV bid cap was £85/MWh (in 2024 pounds). So there is a stonking bid cap discount of 15% comparing actual prices to the bid cap.
If we get the same 15% discount on the bid cap for AR7 solar PV, in a couple of weeks, it should come in a decent 10-12% cheaper than AR6 solar PV, at maybe £65/MWh.
Secondly, David is not telling you what the "balancing costs" are. Most of the current balancing costs are "constraint" costs, caused by the excellent wind power installed in Scotland and the current transmission line constraints in transmitting it to the population centres in England.
While it is fair to add these to current offshore and onshore wind costs (until 2029 when the constraints will start to be relieved), it is a nonsense to add any of these constraint costs to solar PV prices. Who in there right mind installs a lot of solar PV farms in Scotland (which has such excellent wind)? No, the solar farms PV tend to be installed in Southern England, AND DO NOT SUFFER FROM the SCOTLAND ENGLAND GRID BOUNDARY CONSTRAINTS and subsequent balancing costs.
My estimate would be that solar balancing costs are closer to £6/MWh than £20/MWh. So that would bring down all the solar PV costs by £14/MWh.
Aside from those obvious flaws, there are more considerations.
1. The FIT and ROC subsidies are indeed large. But the 20 year contracts for them start dropping out in 2027. By 2036 they will all be gone and these wind and solar farms will be getting the wholesale price.
2. Tandem perovskite solar PV cells are starting volume production, but won't be used in bids for a while as they are not yet getting economies of scale. They bring typical solar panel efficiencies up from low 20%s now, to around 26%, with no increase in most of the balance of system costs. In other words, they will enable UK solar PV costs to drop within a couple of years.
Gas costs
David is not comparing apples with apples in contrasting gas and solar PV. Gas also has balancing costs, which he is not covering. Fossil fuel grids have significant balancing costs. So he should add maybe £6/MWh to gas costs for this.
David's gas fuel costs were only achievable in the last month, previously they would have been maybe £10/MWh higher.
David hasn't added the typical "spark spread" to the gas costs. The implication is that if gas is required to be, say 50% of supply, then the lower efficiency gas plants have to be activated, and the wholesale prices go up. In other words, ample wind power is keeping gas prices down by allowing only the higher efficiency gas plants to be activated. Maybe add another £10/MWh to the cost of gas plants had there been no wind power available.
All in all:-
A) There is a good case that gas power costs are over £100/MWh at times when there is little wind power available.
B) Total costs of solar PV from AR7 is highly likely to be at least £20/MWh cheaper than David's figures and shows that solar PV is indeed one of the cheapest sources of generation - even in the UK.
We won't see the results of AR7a that includes solar until 6th February. AR7 for offshore wind should be published 14th January. A reminder that solar was allocated in full at the ASP cap in AR5, and that the Pot1 auction includes a reserve for onshore wind which will limit the solar award. Some may bid in the hope that contracts will be re-written under REMA on more favourable terms, but equally they may be cautious given the public attitudes of the Tories and Reform: only having 2 years of operation at best before an election adds uncertainty.
The trend in prices has been mildly upward: in 2025 value we have gone from £65.89/MWh in AR4 through £67.34/MWh in AR5 to £71.74/MWh in AR6. I don't expect prices to be much different - possibly higher given rising curtailment risk. They are unlikely to undercut the ASP by much this time.
Most balancing costs are actually concerned with forecast error. Demand forecast error was the main source pre-renewables, with only occasional plant trips and some geographical rebalancing in the NETA/BETTA era, whereas the Pool allowed the Grid to avoid most of that. Demand forecast error remains surprisingly substantial, and is both national and regional (e.g. lights go on when the clouds come over). But added to it is forecast error on renewables output, which leads to the need to ramp up and down alternative supply. These errors are often much bigger than the underlying demand forecast errors often running to several GW, as weather systems fail to match forecast timings and intensities. It is true that plant trips/unexpected outages are now more common with the aged CCGT and nuclear fleet, and we now have to add interconnector trips and non availability (actually the most frequent source of significant frequency upsets). But renewables uncertainty is still a far bigger factor than CCGT/nuclear/biomass/interconnector trips, which add little to balancing costs overall.
Ramping to match varied solar output is a significant cost, some of it hidden from the Balancing Mechanism. For example, Little Barford has often been run ramping down and back up again to accommodate the solar peak in a perfect duck curve, with the contract agreed on a term basis. Solar balancing and system costs are only going to increase as they overload distribution grids: the new Open Balancing Platform and half hourly live metering will help see to that.
We will of course be stuck with all existing PV capacity even if perovskite becomes an economic proposition: on your forecast we would be unlikely to see any much before 2030, given the lead times for projects.
Most gas is actually sold in advance as hedges, so the actual cost paid will reflect the marginal hedge offer, which will be significantly down the merit order. If lower merit plant later buys in wind to cover its forward sale there is no benefit to a supplier from that. A top of merit order plant has lower costs. The average efficiency of gas generation can be deduced from official statistics: it's just under 50%, but that includes much lower efficiency OCGT being run for relatively few hours.
I disagree with your claim about gas cost. I looked at 16th December, where CCGT ran much of the day at over 20GW. The Market Index Prices remained just over £80/MWh for most of the day, reflecting gas cost and higher UKA carbon costs. The evening peak saw no increase in CCGT, with marginal sources being grid batteries, BritNed/NEMO interconnectors and pumped storage, which pushed the price to £110/MWh.
IDAU said "A reminder that solar was allocated in full at the ASP cap in AR5."
Sure - in AR5. But in AR6, the solar strike price was some 18% below the ASP cap (which rose by 30% vs AR5). The AR7 cap has been reduced by 11% vs the AR6 cap.
IDAU said "The trend in prices has been mildly upward: in 2025 value we have gone from £65.89/MWh in AR4 through £67.34/MWh in AR5 to £71.74/MWh in AR6. I don't expect prices to be much different - possibly higher given rising curtailment risk. They are unlikely to undercut the ASP by much this time."
The long term trend of solar PV prices is down, and recent global utility scale solar is also down in price. There is nothing obvious in the current UK policy or supply chain situation to cause prices to continue rising (as there is in the USA). So I would expect a gentle decline on the AR6 strike price.
We will see soon.
IDAU said "the Pot1 auction includes a reserve for onshore wind which will limit the solar award."
It will indeed limit the solar GW installed under AR7. However, the more limited the pot, the more the higher higher priced bids will be squeezed out, leaving lower priced bids.
IDAU said "Most balancing costs are actually concerned with forecast error. "
I downloaded the file from
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/78bts5gkic7af0huy4a6t/Record_CFD_payments_analysis.xlsx?rlkey=5dcnk5gsgbegcolo9x9op3vv2&st=vs0mpfu3&dl=0
My SQL query (run in a browser) without comma formatting the output is:-
https://api.neso.energy/api/3/action/datastore_search_sql?sql=SELECT%20%20SUM(%22Energy%20Imbalance%22)%20AS%20EnergyImbalance,%20SUM(%22Frequency%20Control%22)%20AS%20FrequencyControl,%20SUM(%22Positive%20Reserve%22)%20AS%20PositiveReserve,%20SUM(%22Constraints%22)%20AS%20Constraints,%20SUM(%22Negative%20Reserve%22)%20AS%20NegativeReserve,%20SUM(%22Other%22)%20AS%20Other%20FROM%20%20%22527a5f40-942b-416b-99df-81a51c30d041%22
This shows the majority of balancing costs are constraint costs, not energy imbalances etc. £1.9bn of just over £2bn for financial year 2024/25. Electric insights says that 60% of balancing costs are constraint charges, but that these were overcharged in the past by £800m and roughly one third of this will be returned to electricity consumers each year.
IDAU says "they may be cautious given the public attitudes of the Tories and Reform: only having 2 years of operation at best before an election adds uncertainty."
Bring on Tory and Reform statements that they will dismantle the green progress under the current labour (and preceding conservative) governments, and not honour contracts signed by the current government. That would almost certainly ensure a solid loss for both Tory and Reform at the next general election. Likely, Sunak's backtracking on net zero measured resulted in 10s more Tory MPs losing their jobs in 2024 than need have been the case.
IDAU said "Ramping to match varied solar output is a significant cost, some of it hidden from the Balancing Mechanism. "
Grid batteries are being installed at a decent rate and are brilliant at reducing required CCGT ramp rates when the sun goes down.
IDAU said "A top of merit order plant has lower costs."
While this is true, it doesn't mean that the price these more efficient plants charge for advanced hedge sales is that much less than for the less efficient plants - just that the less efficient plants get contracts for a lower fraction of the time (but at a higher price). Much the same pricing mechanisms and levels will apply for the long term contracts for the more efficient plants as for the spot market - because the proportion of the time when the plants of the various efficiencies (in competition) get scheduled are the same whether you average the spot markets or roll it all up into a long term contract. Under the 2030 CPP, after the capacity payments, presumably everyone will get some sort of cost plus deal - it doesn't matter that much because operating costs for the remaining 5% supply from gas will be a much lower fraction of the total spend on CCGT, most of it going towards the capacity contracts.
IDAU said "I looked at 16th December, where CCGT ran much of the day at over 20GW. "
I would have thought there would be a significant start up (and shut down?) cost for CCGT and OCGT, so a guaranteed continuous run would enable lower gas plant prices.
IDAU said "The evening peak saw no increase in CCGT, with marginal sources being grid batteries, BritNed/NEMO interconnectors and pumped storage, which pushed the price to £110/MWh."
Or it could have been that biomass was the cheapest available generation once solar stopped generating. There is definitely a blip in the biomass use during the evening peak demand times in the chart at https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?start=2025-12-16&&_k=9kcmig. On the other hand, if you have access to the detailed bid pricing (seems unlikely due to commercial secrecy) you might be able to tell me biomass definitely wasn't the cause.
Biomass probably has similar price characteristics to CCGT/OCGT. No carbon costs, but likely higher fuel costs to compensate. Certainly the gas + biomass impact on wholesale prices might be similar to just gas. There seems to be around 3.8 GW of biomass on the transmission grid (likely bidding cheaper than higher efficiency CCGT) and thus visible, plus another 3 GW or so of mainly waste to energy, on the distribution grid, which presumably costs more to run, but maybe not as much as the less efficient gas in the last few GW of transmission connected gas capacity.
Presumably the root of forecasting error is the aggregate of all supplier and generators with NESO left to pick up the consequences? However, surely much of the balancing cost is hard wired in by the system eg windmills will submit their FPNs without a care on grid constraints and NESO will then have to adjust actual generation to match grid capacity. If REMA was to be of any worth it would address this fundamental issue with current mkt design but that would of course require all subsidy schemes to be redesigned so that wont happen and they will perpetuate this wholly inefficient approach.
No. NESO make their own forecasts of demand and renewables output, in addition to having sight of the overall contracted position via Elexon. They're not very good at it.
https://watt-logic.com/2025/05/30/high-wind-and-forecasting-errors-cause-havoc-on-the-gb-grid/
An insight to their methodology
https://www.neso.energy/document/172201/download
They've just taken on a PhD Met Office employee and signed a contract with them to try to improve. Some hope!
Others do it better. E.g. Amira, referenced in Kathryn Porter's piece.
Even hazier are their longer term forecasts for Future Energy Scenarios which display huge hopium biases.
The incentive of the Balancing Mechanism is to try to match your contracted position with actual supply ahead of gate closure for the most part, unless you are highly skilled at guessing which way "chasing the NIV" will go. If customer demand turns out to be higher than the volume purchased a retailer will pay BM system price on the shortfall, and likewise if a generator produces less it will be charged for the shortfall. Vice versa when there is a Net Imbalance Volume surplus. BM system prices are often highly volatile as you can usually see here
https://enact.lcp.energy/
Under the SNP, Scotland has a target for 6GW solar installed by the end of the decade. It would be comical if we didn't all have to pay for this in our bills and lost amenity.
Presumably the CfDs for solar include constraints payments as per wind?
The rules for solar CFDs are the same as for wind. That is, they get compensation up to the strike price so long as the day ahead reference price is not negative. For negative prices no compensation is paid, so they have an incentive to self-curtail. This is determined on metered output, so they need to own a battery to benefit from using it for time shifting. The battery is still separately metered and separately dispatched by the Control Room in the Balancing Mechanism.
In addition they are subject to the same rules in the Balancing Mechanism, which means that the Control Room can act to alter their output based on submitted bids to curtail (or offers to increase if they have chosen self curtailment). So far solar farms have been too small to bother with: it's easier to curtail a wind farm than 10 solar farms. That is changing with larger transmission connected solar farms, and also the more automated processes for balancing already being implemented for grid batteries that are connected (like most solar) at distribution voltages rather than directly to the high voltage Transmission grid.
LB said "Presumably the CfDs for solar include constraints payments as per wind?"
Most Scottish solar generation does not take place at the same time as Scottish wind generation, so there are not likely to be significant constraint costs associated with Scottish solar.
UK wind power output (both onshore and offshore) is generally 50 to 100% higher in winter than in summer. Whereas solar PV output is roughly 5x as much in summer as in winter. 6 GW of Scottish solar by 2030 is also small beer compared to the 12 GW of Scottish onshore and offshore wind already installed.
So there will only be more solar than the network to England can cope with at times when the network is already busy with too much wind power, and both of these don't tend to happen at the same time.
The other thing we know about solar PV output is that all of it occurs during daylight hours. So adding batteries to smooth it over into the night time hours can spread it out over a much longer time (50% longer in summer and up to 200% longer in winter). Batteries are thus more synergistic with solar than with wind, whose ebbs and flows are less predictable.
So there will be far lower constraint payments associated with Scottish solar in summer - most of it can get thorough to the English grid with no problem as most of it will be generated at times when wind generation is lower than peak winter wind.
There is no real anti correlation of solar and wind output in Scotland. Higher outputs of solar occur across a wide range of wind outputs/export surpluses. The critical factor is output in the middle of the day. I ran a scatter plot of solar output against Scottish transfers to England which demonstrates this well. Since solar output in Scotland is even more seasonally peaked than further South, curtailment in high summer could be damaging to solar economics. Batteries (or pumped storage) simply add cost. Which facilities actually curtail depends on their subsidy and contract frameworks. Curtailment will still occur because it is not economic to prevent it.
p.s. I've just edited the numbers in my first response to your comment - the version you saw had a 4 month winter (including DJF+ March). I fixed it in the background spreadsheet. The 40% more constraint charges in winter rather than summer is right (rounded up from 38%).
In the post, somehow I must have changed the % correctly, but omitted to change the Spring and Winter constraint ££s totals to reflect the fixed spreadsheet. Anyway, it is fixed now.
Sorry!
If you total the GB constraint charges for 2024/25 financial year, the total for winter (DJF) is 40% more than the total for summer (JJA) - so there is significantly more curtailment in winter than in summer
Spring £392,480,786 - April to May 2024 + March 2025
Summer £428,354,763 - June through August 2024
Autumn £489,639,682 - Sept 2024 through Nov 2024
Winter £592,933,949 - Dec 2024 through Feb 2025
IDAU said "There is no real anti correlation of solar and wind output in Scotland. "
I don't believe you, because, for wind as a whole, output is 50 to 100% higher in winter than in summer. e.g. averages from https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?period=3-months&start=2025-06-01&&_k=vpnde2 are:-
- JJA 2025, wind 7.55 GW, solar 2.99 GW, total 10.54 GW
- D2024+JF 2025, wind 11.86 GW, solar 0.6 GW, total 12.66 GW
Further, the Google AI says wind and solar output are anti-correlated with a coefficient between -0.2 and -0.4 (Texas ERCOT grid is -0.23 from my detailed analysis of it). Most likely this is due to anti-cyclones which are periods in summer or winter where air is relatively still (isobars further apart) but clear.
IDAU said "Higher outputs of solar occur across a wide range of wind outputs/export surpluses. "
Of course they do - random chance guarantees that! The question is whether high solar output is skewed towards lower wind output or not.
IDAU said "I ran a scatter plot of solar output against Scottish transfers to England which demonstrates this well."
If you didn't do it for a 12 month period you may not get the right picture. Also, remember that while solar in summer may be a higher proportion of supply, to a first cut, the transmission links from Scotland to England have similar capacities in summer to winter (not quite - because the additional overhead line cooling in winter does allow higher powers).
Can you put the output on to Dropbox, with a (view only) link posted here?
IDAU "Since solar output in Scotland is even more seasonally peaked than further South, curtailment in high summer could be damaging to solar economics. "
Because wind output in winter (DFF) is 50% to 100% higher than in summer (JJA), then there is a significantly lower chance of solar curtailment in summer than in winter - for the period at which there is highest solar output. There's a marginal reduction in wind output during the day (vs night) too, but I didn't look at that by season.
IDAU said "Batteries (or pumped storage) simply add cost. "
Hardly, in a situation of highly fluctuating power prices by time of day, plus Scotland to England constraints. I reckon I could make a small profit at home from installing a Tesla Powerwall and enrolling for the Agile Octopus tariff - which has a significant reduction in export vs import tariffs. At a utility scale it should be much easier.
For instance, if you can make £20/MWh on storage, fully cycled each day, in 10 years that is £20 x 365 x 10 = £73,000 per MWh per decade, or £73 per kWh. Yet full BESS costs in China for the December 2024 PowerChina bid averaged $66/kWh or £50/kWh - likely coming to UK by 2030.
If you were going to get zero for significant times of curtailment alongside the normal peak/non peak power pricing, then the batteries hedge against that. Combine it with some sort of frequency response grid stability services contract and it is surely going to be worth it.
IDAU said "Which facilities actually curtail depends on their subsidy and contract frameworks. "
It doesn't matter what is curtailed. If paid anyway the NESO just swap additional CfD power costs for the same balancing curtailment costs - one way or another the power is paid for. If newer projects can't claim the CfD strike price for curtailment, then bids will be higher in the first place to compensate. Better to pay for curtailed power anyway, and fix the transmission constraints as soon as possible (with EGL1 through 5).
IDAU said "Curtailment will still occur because it is not economic to prevent it."
Very true - if you had zero curtailment you are investing too early and paying too high annual charges for transmission line upgrades. Having said that, there is no excuse for not contracting for EGL1 and EGL2 when the requirement became clear some years ago - incompetence.
What about co-located behind the meter batteries though as they can avoid extra system charges?
See my comment above. The saving comes from sharing the grid connection charges that are based on maximum declared export volumes since the battery won't usually be discharging when solar output peaks, but otherwise they are separately metered and dispatched.
Fuse Energy recently raised $70m on a valuation of $5bn, so it’s rather stronger than the 2024 accounts show.
https://techfundingnews.com/fuse-energy-70m-raise-5bn-valuation-ex-revolut-execs/
It seems to be something of a tech darling.
That article says the money is to be used to expand into Ireland, Spain and the US. There's no updated confirmation statement for the UK business.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08469701/filing-history
The Jersey holding company has not filed any accounts:
https://www.jerseyfsc.org/registry/registry-entities/entity/3106767
Umm thats pretty extraordinary but looking at the investors they have picked a few winners over the years in the fintech market
Solar in Scotland is completely mad. Adding batteries just makes it even more expensive.
I would tend to agree.
However, the best locations in Scotland are only a little worse than the worst locations in Germany, and permitting, land and labour costs in Scotland are all likely to be lower than in England. So it all depends on costs up there.
Ive no doubt you can cut the numbers up another way and they will equally stand up to scrutiny but fundamentally when its dark solar panels are of no use and a funny thing is that happens every day come what may. So solar at best is helping to reduce the amount of gas we use but won't eliminate it. Indeed NESO stated that 35GW needed to be retained and Miliband has accepted that so DENZ are now consulting to add a new higher priced tier to the capacity mkt to incentivise new build gas. In the context of the NZ goal at least its recognised that we need a fairly big chunk of gas generation to act as standby but how much does it cost to have effectively close to two generation systems in place?
The other thing about solar is its screwing the wholesale price badly in high summer now which is fine for those on subsidy regimes as they still get paid whatever the price. This gives a lovely arbitrage play for batteries but none of it helps the end consumer who is expected to bankroll all of this. Miliband has never been truly honest about how much net zero will cost. So much for the integrity that Labour said it was bringing to British politics.
N said "when its dark solar panels are of no use and a funny thing is that happens every day come what may. "
If you add 4 hours of batteries to solar PV farms, then you can indeed spread out the solar power to supply load after dusk. UK solar PV output is 5x as much in summer as in winter, and the 4 hours of batteries can spread this into the summer evening peaks and beyond. Note that during summer PV generates during most of the day, which reaches around 16 hours, leaving only 8 hours of night.
UK wind output is generally 50% to 100% higher in winter than in summer, so UK solar and wind are synergistic and you need both to minimise the gaps to be filled by the combination of short duration batteries and (long duration) backup CCGT.
N said "Solar at best is helping to reduce the amount of gas we use but won't eliminate it. "
What you say is true in the UK, but not in most of the world. Most of the world's population lives in much sunnier places, where a considerable proportion of peak demand is due to air conditioning. Further, peak air conditioning demand is guaranteed to be on days where solar PV output is high, as both are dependent on clear, sunny days. Solar plus 4 hours of batteries smooths the daytime generation into the evening to cope with the residual air conditioning load there.
So solar + 4 hours of batteries DOES reduce the required capacity of gas generation in most places, though not in the UK. And it won't completely eliminate the need for gas plants, just reduce the number needed in most places.
N said "In the context of the NZ goal at least its recognised that we need a fairly big chunk of gas generation to act as standby but how much does it cost to have effectively close to two generation systems in place?"
The existing 27 GW of UK gas has 2029 capacity contracts for £60/kW-year, which totals £1.6bn/year. The additional 8 GW needs something £90/kW-year for a 15 year contract, which would be £0.7bn/year. So the total cost of 35 GW of gas backup alongside solar and wind supplying most of the power will be around £2.3bn/year. This isn't excessive. This is roughly 1/3rd of the cost of ROC subsidies right now, but contracts start to expire in 2027 and will all be gone by 2036.
N said "effectively close to two generation systems in place?"
Depending on how you count it, you could call it three - backup gas, wind and solar. Wind and solar are complementary - wind generates more in winter and solar more in summer, so you need both.
But, as mentioned above, the costs are not excessive.
N said "The other thing about solar is its screwing the wholesale price badly in high summer now which is fine for those on subsidy regimes as they still get paid whatever the price. This gives a lovely arbitrage play for batteries but none of it helps the end consumer who is expected to bankroll all of this. "
Surely, if wholesale electricity prices are low or negative in high summer, this means the consumer is paying less. Batteries are not that expensive either. UK may need something like 280 GWh eventually, and the price in China is now around $66/kWh, so this would be around £14bn capital cost or around £1.5bn annualised costs. V2G/V2x may allow EV batteries to be mainly used. UK is likely to have around 2.8 TWh of EV batteries eventually. If 25% of EV owners allowed their EV batteries to be cycled by the grid between 100% and 50% (no lower), this would provide roughly what is needed, likely at much cheaper costs.
N said "Miliband has never been truly honest about how much net zero will cost."
He has made statements of possible savings, and none of these are out of court based on all the back of the envelope calculations I do. The key thing is surely that £7bn/year of ROC (and another £1.7bn/year of FIT) subsidies will be gone by 2037, and none of the gas backup capacity contract or battery costs come anywhere close to the total sum of £8.7bn.
Ignoring the cost to the earth of clawing all the raw materials out of the ground to make solar panels it makes eminent sense to deploy them at scale in equatorial regions and with batteries. In AR6 10 sites were awarded a CfD in Scotland vs c80 sites in England & Wales tells you what solar developers think.
The question isn't whether solar in England is better than solar in Scotland.
The question is whether solar PV in Scotland can be built to deliver a power cost lower than the strike price of the CfD AR7 solar auction.
Land and labour prices in Scotland are likely to be lower than in England and Wales, with far more land for fewer people. Permitting in Scotland is likely to be far easier too.
The economics of 4 hour batteries for solar are challenging. They only really are of use in the sunnier summer months - about 5 months a year - which immediately reduces the number of opportunities to make a round turn profit. With the large volumes of battery projects in the pipeline, batteries are going to struggle to make money. They will need to have several strings to their bows.
It is interesting to note that the Cleve Hill BESS is only 150MW/300MWh for a 373MW solar farm. - i.e. 40% of MW and only 2 hour duration. We can presume they did their sums, including the opportunity to tap into local offshore wind such as Kentish Flats.
IDAU said "Cleve Hill BESS is only 150MW/300MWh for a 373MW solar farm. - i.e. 40% of MW and only 2 hour duration."
Original plans for Cleve Hill had 700 MWh of batteries (~2 hours of nameplate solar output).
IDAU said "The economics of 4 hour batteries for solar are challenging. They only really are of use in the sunnier summer months - about 5 months a year."
That is not true. There's a big price differential between peak hour wholesale prices and overnight prices in winter. As long as the solar storage can charge from the grid as well, there is money to be made in time shifting, and the later afternoon/evening peak is around 4 hours.
I reckon I could probably make money out of trading power in winter with a Tesla powerpack on the Agile Octopus retail scheme, and that must discount export prices heavily. See https://agile.octopushome.net/dashboard . If that is true of retail time shifting, then it must be much easier for utility scale time shifting with no export discount.
The point surely is that the optimal battery MWh depends on the cost of batteries, which is coming down rapidly. Likely the appropriate metric (as ever) is the cost per cycle.
I imagine that the owners of Cleve Hill are smarter at the economics than you. Whether a longer duration battery can be traded profitably depends on the duration of adequately differentiated prices to make a margin on the round trip. There are many sites where estimates of optimal battery duration can be found, which also make projections of the future. Most projections suggest that battery margins will come under pressure from overcapacity and competition, with only the best located ones able to produce a viable trading strategy.
The Octopus tariff is designed to recover costs through charging high prices for peak hours consumption: it is set by them, and not by competition. By extending the hours of peak pricing they make it hard to evade higher prices for most on the tariff. Batteries are already finding competition among themselves and with gas fired generation limit the margin opportunities.
Longer duration storage projects are being lined up for subsidies: e.g. the pumped storage projects on the Great Glen, CAES etc.
15 paragraphs of clutching at straws. The Dunkelflautes which will bring the economy to ruin can last for days or even weeks in cold dark midwinter when power is needed most. Most BESS installations are money-grafting projects with only about an hours-worth of capacity. During a severe midwinter Dunkelflaute it is unlikely that these battery systems will be able to supply a period of peak demand then re-charge as well as keeping everything else running before the next period of peak demand.
DB said "The Dunkelflautes which will bring the economy to ruin can last for days or even weeks in cold dark midwinter when power is needed most."
The UK 2030 CPP retains all 27 GW of existing transmission connected gas plants, with a plan to add another 8 GW. Thus the CPP is proof against any durations of dunkeflautes. So the economy doesn't get ruined.
DB said "Most BESS installations are money-grafting projects with only about an hours-worth of capacity. "
The most recent installed BESS capacity seems to be 2 hours at the moment. There is, as yet, no specification for the duration of the 23-27 GW of BESS targeted in the CPP. It needs to be somewhere between 4 and 6 hours.
DB said "It is unlikely that these battery systems will be able to supply a period of peak demand then re-charge as well as keeping everything else running before the next period of peak demand."
There's generally 18 to 20 hours between consecutive evening peaks - plenty of time to recharge.
The criterion moves from CCGT backup needing to supply peak hour demand (less other firm generation such as nuclear, Drax) to needing to supply the average of the peak 24 hour demand (less other firm generation).
So, under the brave new 2030 CCP we will have ample gas-fired generation to withstand a prolonged Dunkelflaute? I very much doubt it. The existing fleet is mostly very old and the current procurement time on new builds is said to be at least eight years due to sky-high global demand.
But if the CCGT capacity were sufficient, what on earth is the point of building a hugely expensive parallel generation network of very expensive, not at all "green", insecure, unsustainable, weather-dependent, low energy density, highly-dispersed windmills and solar panels requiring massive landscape-despoiling pylon and interconnection infrastructure and lots of expensive BESS?
It is clear after more than 20 years of the climate change hoax that CO2 emissions have negligible impact on the global climate, and even if the fraudulent UN IPCC CO2 global warming hypothesis were true, unilateral UK Net Zero is utterly pointless while the majority rest of the world carries on with fossil fuel business as usual.
You should watch John Constable’s 45-minute lecture (starting at 1:25) describing how reliance on such low grade energy is the road to national ruin, sadly already well travelled by the delusional UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYHRngcYyB8.
PS: There are morning peaks as well as evening peaks, especially in cold, dark midwinter.
DB said "So, under the brave new 2030 CCP we will have ample gas-fired generation to withstand a prolonged Dunkelflaute? I very much doubt it."
The logical flaw in your thinking is that, somehow, adding more wind and solar power makes the grid less capable of handling a prolonged Dunkelflaute.
Since we are keeping all the existing gas fired generation, and it will be some time before demand from heat pumps take off, it follows that the CPP configuration will be just as capable of handling a prolonged Dunkelflaute as it is today. In fact, more so, because battery storage is being added all the time, and this enables peak demand in the absence of wind and solar to be met with the combination of more batteries + gas plants, the batteries being charged by starting the gas plants early.
DB said "The existing fleet is mostly very old and the current procurement time on new builds is said to be at least eight years due to sky-high global demand."
There has been no reservations raised about the existing gas fleet being unreliable.
DB said "But if the CCGT capacity were sufficient ..."
If won't be sufficient once UK heat pumps start to become a real thing - from 2035 (?? guess). But it can service a higher peak hour demand if batteries are installed alongside it.
DB said "what on earth is the point of building a hugely expensive parallel generation network of very expensive, not at all "green", insecure, unsustainable, weather-dependent, low energy density, highly-dispersed windmills and solar panels requiring massive landscape-despoiling pylon and interconnection infrastructure and lots of expensive BESS?"
The total per MWh costs (including annualised capital contribution) of wind and solar are lower than those of gas plants, especially once you include the carbon costs. And power from wind and solar invariably get cheaper over the long term, though Putin and others are capable of causing blips to the downward progress.
The fact wind and solar are weather dependent does not make them unreliable. With 8 hours of grid batteries for short duration gaps and existing gas plants for longer duration gaps, the variable power from wind and solar can readily be firmed up to meet UK variable demand.
The UK requirement for solar PV power is likely to take no more than 2% of land (and not the most fertile land at that). Further, most of the wind power will be generated by offshore wind - most of which will be out of sight of land. It is thus a gross exaggeration to claim "massive landscape despoiling". Nor are pylons actually seen as despoiling the landscape by those living within sight of them - house prices tend to go down when a new line of pylons is planned, then go up again when it is completed.
Grid batteries are significantly cheaper than gas peaker plants now. Gas peakers are probably around $1.5m/MW, while December 2024 prices for PowerChina BESS capacity came at $66/kWh, so a total of 1 MW, 8 hours would be 8 MWh and would be roughly $550k/MW - or about one third of the cost of gas peakers. Yes it will take a few years for such prices to work their way over here, but the writing is already on the wall for gas peakers.
DB said "It is clear after more than 20 years of the climate change hoax that CO2 emissions have negligible impact on the global climate"
So why is ocean heat content (around 90% of the heat from global warming) rising steadily at the rate of about 0.45W/m^2 (of earth's surface, not just the oceans)over the last 20 years? See that last chart of https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202506.
On BBC Radio 4 this morning, More or Less checked with the experts on climate, and apparently we in the UK get 10% more rain in winter than we used to. That is why some people call it "global weirding", instead of "global warming". See https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p0msf6qd.
DB said "unilateral UK Net Zero is utterly pointless while the majority rest of the world carries on with fossil fuel business as usual."
That would indeed be the case if the biggest polluters were doing nothing. But since 2023, China has installed more wind and solar than the rest of the world put together, and it is now resulting in a small reduction in Chinese grid coal use and CO2 emissions, despite Chinese demand rising by over 5%.
And China is also selling over 55% new BEVs + PHEVs now. It has been over 50% for around 18 months now. It is 2-3 years in front of even the UK, which came in at 32.2% BEVs + 11.6% PHEVs total 43.8% in December 2025 - and on track to be over 50% plug ins by the end of 2026. See https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/
China is responsible for 30% of global CO2 emissions. But by 2035, on current trends, it is expected to have lower total emissions than the USA.
So it is now NOT true that UK is on its own. China takes climate change very seriously indeed, putting UK and everyone else to shame with its actions to address its own emissions (despite how hard it is when GDP and electricity demand grow by 5% or more each year). Pro rata to population vs China, UK should be installing 20 GW of wind and solar each year, and it is not yet anywhere close to that.
DB said "You should watch John Constable’s 45-minute lecture (starting at 1:25) describing how reliance on such low grade energy is the road to national ruin"
Isn't this guy a proven climate denier? If he doesn't accept we need to address climate change, then the rest of his "information" is also likely to be skewed to supporting the fossil fuel industry irrespective of the actual facts.
Copper prices up and silver prices 2.5X prices this time last year. Chinese suppliers losing money. Cost of UK labour rising because increased NI.
I don't think the cost of solar panels and more importantly solar installations are coming down soon.
If we used more gas, that would support investment in newer, more efficient power plants.
The total balancing costs in the calculation above are already adjusted down by £750m to account for balancing costs before intermittent renewables.
DT said "Copper prices up and silver prices 2.5X prices this time last year. "
Aluminium is a good substitute for copper as a high current conductor. And copper and aluminium are reasonable substitutes for silver for solar cell interconnections.
DT said "Chinese suppliers losing money."
Sure, but western solar PV panel manufacturing costs are coming down. Further, tandem perovskite panels increasing efficiency by 25% or so will inevitably reduce total system costs, even if the panels are more expensive.
DT said "Cost of UK labour rising because increased NI."
Routine installation and wiring of solar farms is surely something that AI robots should find straightforward. Similarly, they can do the occasional solar panel cleaning.
DT said "If we used more gas, that would support investment in newer, more efficient power plants."
The capital cost of gas plants has more or less doubled, because of the fear of increased AI data centre load has the industry gripped. Waiting lists have gone to something like 3 years to obtain new CCGT plant. Personally I think the data centre demand increase is over-hyped, but we will see. Given the capital cost increase, it seems unlikely that anyone is going to invest in new plant when an old one still works. Further, under the 2030 Clean Power plan, gas is expected to supply no more than 5% of UK demand, which means gas plant utilisation will be much lower than at present. So there is even less incentive to install a new gas plant.
DT said "The total balancing costs in the calculation above are already adjusted down by £750m to account for balancing costs before intermittent renewables."
Isn't that the same thing as saying balancing of gas plants should also have a share of the £750m allocated to them?
Further, if you have taken off the £750m, then the balancing cost of solar would be much lower than the £6/MWh I estimated - more like £2/MWh.
What would be better is to add in a couple of hours of batteries to solar costs to remove some of the required balancing functions, though these bring cost benefits to all generation types.
For instance, if UK had 280 GWh of batteries, it could have less gas plant capacity than the peak hour demand, because the batteries could be charged in advance of peak hour, which could then be supplied by a lower capacity of gas plants plus discharging batteries. You could reduce "enough gas plants to satisfy peak hour" down to "enough gas plants to satisfy the average demand over the peak 24 hours".
So you suggest "For instance, if UK had 280 GWh of batteries, it could have less gas plant capacity than the peak hour demand, because the batteries could be charged in advance of peak hour" is fine in the summer but in mid winter its not going to work which is why we need to keep 35GW of gas plant.
NESO today forecast 49GW for evening peak. So lets pick worst case with low wind dark night where's that coming from. 35GW CCGTs (not sure we have that now by the way) leaves 14GW which if we are lucky Hinckley can give 3.4, Sizewell B another 1.8 and the tree burners another 4GW. So thats 5GW from interconnectors?. Not today me old son as our so called expensive gas is in high demand from Europe even the French i/c is on export.
Thus we are going to need those two systems for sometime yet. But it gets worse as we now need basically a second grid to move the renewable power to where its needed so thats a lot of infrastructure to fund and maintain. You could see some rationale to that argument if the energy produced was going to be very cheap as promised but its not so economically it doesn't make sense.
N said' "For instance, if UK had 280 GWh of batteries, it could have less gas plant capacity than the peak hour demand, because the batteries could be charged in advance of peak hour" is fine in the summer but in mid winter its not going to work which is why we need to keep 35GW of gas plant.'
Sure you need to calculate against annual peak demand for GB, not against an average summer day.
Nuclear 5.2 GW (6.4 GW when Sizewell C replaces Sizewell B supposedly) "Biomass" includes burning of waste and is nearly 7 GW altogether. See the "Installed capacity" and [Note 1] around half way down https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/?p=2570.
Total non-gas firm generation 13 GW. 49 GW less 13 GW is 36 GW, so 36 GW of gas plants + charged batteries will be needed.
N said "35GW CCGTs (not sure we have that now by the way)"
The normally quoted figure is 27 GW of transmission connected CCGT/OCGT. 35 GW assumes the NESO contracts for another 8 GW with capacity contracts. There is more in distribution networks and private, which can be called on at much higher cost.
N said "So thats 5GW from interconnectors?"
Interconnectors shouldn't be counted for energy security connections. But they can be used instead of higher priced generators to lower wholesale and consumer costs.
N said "We now need basically a second grid to move the renewable power to where its needed so that's a lot of infrastructure to fund and maintain. "
Second grid? Hardly. There needs to be some expansion of the current grid to cope with offshore wind and the better generation in Scotland, but most of the grid network is dependent only on demand, not on how it is supplied.
And, although the grid will end up larger, that will eventually be supporting a significantly higher demand.
Journalist Will Jones recently published (can’t find the link) how much money he makes, paid for by the rest of us, from his Feed-in-Tarriff home solar panels.
Thanks to “useful idiot” plonkers like Campbell and Stewart, the UK continues remorselessly down the Net Zero road of wrecking our energy infrastructure and thence our entire economy by rolling out very expensive, not at all "green", insecure, unsustainable, weather-dependent windmills and solar panels.
Meanwhile, the USA is close to a breakthrough on building a commercial nuclear fusion power plant which will leave Net Zero ideologues trailing in the dust: https://brianlantz.substack.com/p/fusion-now.
Nuclear fusion is said to be 'close', but so far it has never produced a single Watt that didn't take more energy put in than gotten out - so don't hold your breath on that.
I agree with the rest of your comment.
I looked up the current solar FiT rates just recently. The top rate for domestic solar is £743.70/MWh. Even puts tidal stream on 5 ROC/MWh worth ~£375 in subsidy in the shade!
I stopped looking when it exceeded £600 ish
Stewart is an Oxford PPE graduate, Campbell is a Cambridge modern language grad. In other words both know the square root of FA about electricity but an awful lot about sounding like they do. That is for me the whole problem with British politics- dominated by people who all think/talk the same on the left and right.
The solar industry gets a lot of mileage out of those claims that solar is “cheap.” Generally such claims are generally based on 1) higher capacity factors than are realistic in a place like the UK and 2) the pretense that solar is replacing other energy sources rather than displacing them. I encounter the same claims here in upstate NY in the US as well. Our suitability for solar is a little better than the UK’s, but we still have LOTS of cloud and snow cover to contend with. Capacity factors for smaller utility-scale solar (5-10 MW plants) average about 11.5% in my neck of the woods. Yet I’m seeing developers claim over 20% when promoting projects—and see them do the same in the UK. It’s absurd. No one challenges the narrative with real numbers for a specific geography. There are real differences in things like land costs and capacity factors.
I checked out NESO's data on Historic Demand that also includes embedded solar generation and capacity per half hour for 2025. Given the trumpeting about it having been the sunniest year on record I was surprised that the average capacity factor worked out at only 10.3%.
Plotting the data and summarising it to daily outputs revealed no obvious data glitches. It's basically almost identical to the Sheffield Solar PV numbers.
KM said "the pretense that solar is replacing other energy sources rather than displacing them."
The distinction here surely requires explanation.
KM said "I encounter the same claims here in upstate NY in the US as well. Our suitability for solar is a little better than the UK’s, but we still have LOTS of cloud and snow cover to contend with. Capacity factors for smaller utility-scale solar (5-10 MW plants) average about 11.5% in my neck of the woods. Yet I’m seeing developers claim over 20% when promoting projects."
The Google AI comes up with:-
New York State's utility-scale solar capacity factors vary regionally, with averages around 15-18% statewide, but showing higher rates (closer to 22%) in sunnier areas like Long Island compared to lower rates (around 13-14%) upstate
So you can both be right, but about different locations within New York state. There are surely solar maps for NY which would give you a better feel for the different locations.
KM said "And see them do the same in the UK."
I've never seen any claim for more than an 11% UK solar capacity factors, though you might even do better than this in South Western and Eastern England.
KM said "There are real differences in things like land costs"
The good news is that tandem perovskite solar cells are coming and likely to boost solar efficiencies from low 20%s (with silicon solar cells) to around 26% for current production ramping up. The implication is that the same area (with the same land costs) can generate maybe 25% more power with tandem perovskite. The technology itself is likely to provide even higher efficiencies over time.
And that is why we can confidently predict solar PV prices will continue to fall - panels are a small part of the overall cost nowadays.
First I've heard of tandem perovskite. Sounds interesting - I'll see if I can learn more...
Found a good unbiased explanatory video - it's not commercial yet - still lab testing and experimenting for how to scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Eh9m4U7GGk
My understanding is that Oxford PV has started manufacturing of tandem perovskite on silicon panels. The press release at https://www.oxfordpv.com/press-releases/oxford-pv-solar-technology-patent says it is manufacturing "at MW scale" tandem solar PV panels at 24.5% efficiency, with 26.9% in the offing.
MW scale is not enough - we need GW scale. But you do have to start somewhere.
Thanks for the link.
You are absolutely correct.
Well. not wanting to lower the tone of the discussions but one of Polanski‘s previous fortes was hypnotherapy, in one newsworthy session he offered to help a woman increase the size of her breasts and change her body shape……He should’ve hypnotised Stewart not to ask uncomfortable questions.
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/exclusive-zack-polanski-hits-back-at-labours-breast-enlargement-attacks-397671/
There was a very recent interview between Stewart and Polanski. Stewart started by saying that he wanted to get an idea of Polanski's grip on 'the numbers'. His first question was "How big is the National Debt?". Polanski waffled, he obviously didn't know. After further questions it became apparent that Polanski didn't know the difference between National Debt and The Deficit. So I'm surprised that Stewart would consider voting green.
You are assuming that Stewart is capable of drawing conclusions from a diverse set of facts.
There appears to be as little basis for that assumption as there is for Stewart's political "beliefs".
Perhaps he wants bigger boobs.
Let’s be honest here for one moment- Honesty and Campbell are complete strangers- Campbell is famous for his ability to twist half baked facts and display incredulity when the dossier that “proves” these half baked facts leads to a war in which not only British & American soldiers die, but hundreds of thousands of innocents- “nothing to do with me”!
Campbell reminds you of the Cheshire Cat in Alice. The Cheshire Cat famously tells Alice, "We're all mad here," and that she must be mad because she came to Wonderland. He also notes he is "not all there himself".
As for Rory, well the least said the better, but as a foil for Campbell he is a failure.
Let us be honest here for one moment. The failure of Rory as a politician seems to have been due mainly to the fact that he was too honest and couldn't bring himself to parrot some of the statements of the conservative party about Brexit which deviated too far from the known facts.
I would have thought the two would have made perfect foils for each other. Not that I have ever viewed the podcast.
The UK electorate and particularly Ogfem are living in la la land and have been for decades. Liz Truss could have righted the ship but she was crucified for her proposed policies by both houses.
https://x.com/trussliz/status/2008824938829103488?s=46
If someone is as naive as Liz Truss about how UK's finances actually work, then it doesn't seem likely they would have the nous to tackle any other areas either - and particularly energy which is notoriously complicated.
Liz Truss was removed from office by those who have always held the reins of power ie the City of London and the banking oligarchy.
Thanks Iain!
Truss was brought down by the BofE and its engineered crisis that broke due to Pension Fund mismanagement
The Mechanism of the Crisis
The "banking problem" was not a failure of traditional banks themselves, but a systemic vulnerability within the UK's defined benefit pension schemes, which used a strategy called Liability-Driven Investment (LDI).
LDI Strategies: For years, encouraged by regulators, many pension funds used LDI strategies, often with leverage (borrowed money), to manage their long-term liabilities by investing heavily in UK government bonds, known as gilts. This strategy worked well in an era of low, stable interest rates.
The Mini-Budget Trigger: On September 23, 2022, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced £45bn of unfunded tax cuts without an accompanying independent forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Markets lost confidence in the government's ability to manage its finances, causing the value of the pound to fall and the price of gilts to drop sharply (and their yields to spike).
Margin Calls and the "Doom Loop": The rapid fall in gilt prices triggered "margin calls" on the leveraged LDI positions. Pension funds were forced to urgently sell more gilts to raise cash and meet these calls. This fire sale drove gilt prices even lower, triggering more margin calls, creating a "doom loop" that threatened the solvency of several funds.
Bank of England Intervention: The situation became a financial stability crisis, as a failure of the pension funds could have caused wider bankruptcies among lending banks. The Bank of England had to intervene with an emergency program to buy up to £65 billion worth of long-dated gilts to stabilize the market and prevent a systemic collapse.
There is nothing wrong with LDI per se; it is a strategy (as the words suggest) of matching the assets of a DB scheme as precisely as possible to the liabilities, both as regards quantum and timing. It is entirely appropriate for a DB scheme in run-off, which almost every private sector DB scheme is. The portfolio becomes wholly a mixture of gilts, high quality corporate bonds and longevity swaps to manage the parts of the liability curve where there are no bonds of appropriate duration available. The portfolio is never traded but held to maturity with the cash flows from coupons and maturities paying the liabilities as they fall due. The scheme becomes immune to interest rate risk, as any change in the value of the bond portfolio caused by a change in market yields is matched by a corresponding change in the value of the liabilities, keeping both sides of the fund balanced. It is the ultimate in prudent management.
The problem that broke out was not LDI, but the overlay of gearing, which you reference. Because most pension schemes were not fully funded a perfect LDI strategy wasn’t (and isn’t possible); you can’t match your assets perfectly to your liabilities if you don’t have enough assets! Pension scheme deficits are nothing new; traditionally they are addressed by recovery schemes involving additional pension contributions from the employer. But when schemes are legacy history sponsoring employers have greater and greater reluctance to shell out more money to address historic issues. The “solution” was therefore to use some of the very long dated gilts as collateral to borrow money to buy equities, the dividends and growth from which would plug the deficit with minimal need for employer contributions. What the actuaries at the pension consultancies which arranged the structures didn’t anticipate was movements on long term yields as dramatic as actually occurred, resulting in falls in the value of the collateral, margin calls and the need to sell bonds which weren’t intended ever to be sold to meet the calls. Which of course caused a market spiral.
The problem was entirely caused by breaching the general advice to any investor: don’t borrow to invest in equities! The problem was not LDI. Without the gearing it didn’t matter if long dated assets fell in value as, with perfect liability matching, the net present value of the liabilities would reduce pari passu.
It was all about bonds. ZIRP and QE purchases inflated bond prices and lowered yields which reduced annuities based on gilts. Leveraged Debt Instruments are financial derivatives that pay out a multiple of nominal yield at the time of purchase in exchange for accepting capital losses risk on a multiple of nominal capital collateral. When ZIRP ended the capital losses on long dated low coupon gilts were extreme.
We are seeing the effects in the massive losses on the BoE QE portfolio as well, adding to debt to be financed.
But not relevant to final salary pension schemes. Absent the gearing resulting in forced sales of long dated gilts to meet margin calls, trustees were indifferent to the falls in the value of bonds whose known inward cash flows through to maturity matched, in a perfect LDI strategy, the outward cash flows to pay pensions. The solvency of the fund was unchanged as, while the assets fell in value, the NPV of the liabilities fell pari passu when discounted at the higher yield of the matched bonds.
The crisis was caused by borrowing to buy equities using the long dated bonds as collateral.
No. Essentially ut was a gamble that ZIRP would last for the duration of the LDIs. Bond convexity can be cruel when leveraged.
I bumped into Rory at a social event in Scotland a couple of years ago. Never met him before but had heard the recent interview that R&A held with Dieter Helm. Dieter explained the utter nonsense of the Government’s approach to NetZero. This sent Campbell into conniptions. Rory made a half hearted attempt to support his guest (who he has huge respect for) while also seeking to avoid a beating from his co-host.
Then came the interview with Emma Pinchbeck- a talking head for the utterly clueless CCC. That suits Campbell who wants to think that Milliband is pursuing a sensible strategy; Rory (like AC) simply doesn’t know what questions to ask. Nor does Emma Pinchbeck. She just delivers the lines she is given by the CCC.
Back to that encounter with Rory up at Perth….. I asked him why he doesn’t bring on someone like Kathryn Porter of Watt-Logic to explain what’s going on in UK energy. Sorry David, I didn’t know who you are back then. In any case Kathryn has never been on the show - presumably vetoed by Alastair. They are way out of their depth…..
Stewart did sound like he was having a damascene moment over NZ in late summer maybe after the Dieter Helm episode. They started doing what is nothing but advertising for Fuse energy couched to sound as though its just the pair of them discussing any other topic. So its no wonder they've veered to CC/NZ again otherwise there sponsor wouldn't be too happy.
PBMD said "Dieter explained the utter nonsense of the Government’s approach to NetZero."
Helm has blind spots. There is always something missing from his analyses. Personally I think he just tries to be too black and white without thinking or crunching all the numbers. He is best ignored unless you need someone to act as a "devil's advocate" - forcing you to address all the issues before reaching a conclusion.
Give me a couple of blind spots please?
They maybe intervened but they certainly took their time before lifting a finger