I've been trying to gain a clear understanding on the carbon taxes applied to gas usage and how those taxes affect our bills.
You write that this tax is equivalent to £14.60 per MWh and only applies to gas used for generating electricity and not on gas used to power gas boilers. Is my understanding correct?
(I'm surprised that carbon tax wouldn't apply to all gas usage since gas is 'evil' and the govt wants to deter us from using gas boilers).
Just to give some context amongst the madness of net zero and our insane energy policies, Delivered by politicians who must surely have studied at the Heath Robinson Academy of Energy!
The Earth’s surface receives roughly **1.152 × 10²¹ joules of solar energy per hour on the sunlit side** (320,000 TWh × 3.6 × 10¹⁵ J/TWh), or **2.246 × 10²¹ joules globally averaged per hour** (624,000 TWh × 3.6 × 10¹⁵ J/TWh). For comparison, humanity’s total energy consumption in a year is about **5.76 × 10²⁰ joules** (160,000 TWh × 3.6 × 10¹⁵ J/TWh), meaning the Sun delivers vastly more energy in an HOUR than we use in a YEAR.
Many thanks for this info Mr Turver. The thing I don't understand (amongst many) is why the grid has these auctions and that sets the price. Why can folk not say 'I want to buy 100% unreliable (without the certificate fall backs) energy' and that be what they get, regardless of generation or cost. Another could say I want 100% nuclear and they get that.
Although that sounds rather too much like a market for the green agenda.
It's screaming that the entire energy market has been rigged to disguise the cost of unreliables, to create a smoke and mirrors of taxation (on reliable fuels) to make them artificially expensive. The state then slaps those taxes on 'the cost of gas' (because businesses do not pay taxes, customers do) .
Big fat state then hands that tax to unreliable sources to pretend they're cheaper than they are. Big government then creates all sorts of subsidy and payments (AR, CFDs) in various forms to disguise the utter unreliability, inefficiency and sheer cost of these not remotely 'green' deployments.
As I've said before, our house benefitted from an ECO4 grant (which is really just a tax rebate) and maybe my railing makes me a hypocrite, but prior to buying the house we were quoted for a gas pipeline. Most of us in the road would still like gas. I'd be happy to pay for the local connection but we couldn't afford the six figures for the main pipeline. The government, through legislation; removed that choice.
That seems to be the fundamental intent and source of the problem: the removal of choice and a farrago of tax and subsidy to disguise a thoroughly broken market where the customer loses out.
What happens when people simply can't afford energy? Rationing? Hang on - we're already there.
What is truly amazing is that the Government gets more income from 5 percent VAT than the suppliers do in profit. I had wondered why the old PES suppliers were coming out of supply. Now I understand.
Andrew Montford has done a piece about why the price of electricity is based on gas. I didn't understand it fully but it seemed to me that it amounted to another subsidy for renewables. If I understand correctly they add suppliers starting at the lowest price, usually wind. Finally they reach the highest price which is usually gas and that sets the wholesale price of electricity for that period for all suppliers. So that difference between the price they bid and the price they got must be a kind of bonus or subsidy. As it turns out, since the wholesale price is usually lower than the strike price they get subsidy on top of that again in the form of Cfds. Have I got this wrong?
The market no longer works like that, except for a slice of the day ahead market. Most electricity is sold via bilateral contracts between generators and traders and retailers that have prices set by the contracts. I wrote out a reasonably comprehensive description here (also see the follow up comments which add more clarity)
That's interesting. Is there any public data I can use to back up what you say in that comment you linked to. For instance the terms of typical PPA agreements for renewables and the proportion of time interconnector prices set the market price. That might be an interesting subject for another article.
There is more detail in the underlying report. Also read all the comments: Gordon expands on several points. And there are some other useful contributions 😊
I think there is quite a bit more analysis that could be added.
Thanks for the very helpful breakdown of the different components. No wonder the market is so challenging for many to navigate (customers and suppliers both.)
One area it would be interesting to see similar analysis of is the infrastructure costs - where are we now, what is proposed at transmission level and in current and emerging electricity distribution price controls. The costs of the infrastructure component are not really discussed and even less understood. Do you know if anyone has looked at this part of the system?
Ofgem are of course looking to accelerate depreciation of gas networks such that customers pay them off early from April 2026. How this runs into customers bills and meets the promises to reduce them by £300 will be interesting to watch.
My take from the government propaganda is that yes building the infrastructure & windmills/solar is big money up front (not to mention the landscape destruction & loss of arable farmland), but the power it generates is free so it doesn’t matter. Not only are the costs enormous upfront capex but so few people (David an exception) will even talk about the actuality, maintenance , decommissioning & disposal & life span. It’s simply mind blowing. Someday in the future when we look round at all these broken bits of stuff littering the land it will seem odd.
As we've seen windmills and solar are very vulnerable to weather - hail and very strong winds.
As for free: when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining that cost still exists and the item isn't working. It's an employee sat idle, costing money.
Only in the mind of lunatic government could unreliables be considered rational. I think they're all completely mad, desperate to hide the true costs of their mania.
They're the nutjob idiots who forced the insanity of 'net zero' on us in the first place.
When Truss presented fracking she was removed. It's all a bit conspiracy theory-ish but the policies that would have created growth, undone the enforced decline of tax and waste and ended the green hegemony were swiftly dealt with and prevented from being enacted by defenestrating the government that presented them.
In the wake of destroying the pro-growth, no green agenda a high tax, big state chancellor and ineffectual PM were installed to ensure the decline continued.
TLDR: it's the blasted Tories' fault we're in this mess!
Note that the volume of curtailment has been increasing rapidly as more wind capacity is added, but this also results in more competition for payment, particularly from newer wind farms whose terms give them no subsidy when prices are negative or who haven't commenced a CFD and therefore do not lose subsidy payments when prices are low and positive. Prices have collapsed. REF blogged the issue highlighting previous overcharging here
Of course the other side of the coin is the cost of other actions for balancing. So far we have relatively rarely reached the point at which wind is just surplus to demand (given must run nuclear and inertia providing CCGT), so much of the curtailed volume gets replaced by turning up CCGT in England. The curtailment is said to be due to transmission constraints- the lack of capacity so send power south from Scotland. However, if the constraints were eliminated under present grid operating rules there would still need to be a significant element of curtailment and replacement by CCGT ro ensure adequate inertia on the grid. NESO are busy trying to secure authorisation to operate the grid on a low inertia knife edge that would increase blackout risk and leave us dependent on batteries to handle grid upsets.
The other interplay is with interconnector trade. If you compare the full cost of renewables including subsidies it is almost always higher than the cost of imported power and of CCGT, so enabling more renewables increases consumer costs. Insult is added to injury where interconnectors are exporting highly subsidised renewables generation for the benefit of overseas consumers with the subsidy paid by British billpayers.
They do have the synchronous condensers and some grid forming batteries which are being used in lieu of CCGTs although or do wonder how it will all react under a big system outage situation as we saw back in 2019 there were unintended outcomes.
Excellence as usual on a Sunday morning - thank you David. I watched Mr Ward and the Latin phrase "Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses" sprang instantly to mind. I first came across it on Yes Prime Minister many years ago - I hope it provides some amusement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beuKfLn8a6c
My monthly energy bills are now higher than my monthly mortgage payments. This is despite the fact that, according to the handy energy usage graph my utilities company provides, I am using /less/ energy than last year or the year before. Thankfully I only have a few more months to put up with this, not because of seasonal change (British soggy summers mean heating in August), but because I have had enough and am selling the house, to move to France where, as I’ve read recently, by contrast electricity bills are due to come down.
Net Zero sits like a lead weight on nearly all our lives ( save those at airy top of the pile) It is the one horse race the UK government is determined to win at speed. The 'horse' has given itself a set of blinkers it refuses to have removed.
The electrification of society is not the cheap option, and when those huge data centres are built for the 'AI- ification' of society how is electricity to ever be cheaper than gas, oil. Electricity will be gobbled up by these power hungry sources, so the citizens of the UK are being conditioned to accept rationing, 'demand pricing'. Electricity on tap so to speak will become a luxury item fewer and fewer will be able to afford. How does that square with 'electric Ed Milliband's 'cheaper bills' and only by a measly £350 a year.....not even £30 a month. When will the last fence be jumped? When will the horse be on its knees? When will it go to the knacker's yard? I don't suppose electric Ed will care, likely retired in a cosy stable, House of Lords. Lord Wattage of Outtage.
No one wants to accept rationing. It'll be forced on us. I think at that point either there will be a diaspora of lies spewed out by the Left or riots.
The UK government's policy of waging undeclared war against Russia - along with the rest of NATO and the EU - has deliberately deprived us of the cheapest and most reliable sources of oil and gas.
More and more ordinary Russians are now making angry remarks online about how the world would be better off if the British Isles were destroyed.
While Russia cannot actually remove the UK from the map, it can - with relatively little effort - render them permanently uninhabitable. But our insouciant rulers seem completely oblivious.
You have it the wrong way around. Russia's policy to to wage undeclared war against NATO and the EU. The gas and oil supply from Russia never was reliable from that perspective, as history has clearly shown. Resilience is key and will be going forward, in energy, manufacturing and defense. Rely on one source at your peril in this deglobalising world.
"Russia's policy to to wage undeclared war against NATO and the EU".
Evidence? Until about 2008, the Russian government was eager to cooperate as closely as possible with the West. They even requested formally to be allowed to join NATO - a request that was rudely rejected.
It is quite true that Russia decided, no later than 2008, that the West led by the USA had the very worst intentions towards Russia. (I don't know why it took them so long - it was glaringly obvious right from 1990). At that point Mr Putin decided that Russia should rearm and prepare to defend itself, which it has done quite effectively.
Russia would be quite content to ignore NATO, the EU, and the USA if they were not so outspoken about their hostile intentions. Russia can thrive as a part of Asia, trading with almost everyone outside the "Golden Billion".
Of course, devious and manipulative Westerners have perfected the art of portraying reasonable and moderate measure of self-defence as aggression.
"The gas and oil supply from Russia never was reliable from that perspective, as history has clearly shown".
Please supply evidence in support of that untrue claim. The USSR and Russia have never interrupted supplies except when that was done by Westerners - e.g. the destruction of Nord Stream by the US armed forces.
Russian fuel has always been not only the cheapest, but the most reliable. Unlike, for example, the USA, which is likely to threaten cutting off supplies at any time in order to get its way.
Funny you mention 2008 as the point at which Russia was earge to cooperate with the West. The invasion of Georgia, conducted by Russia was incompatible with the West's values and alliances so there was no way any cooperation could be that close after that. This was followed up by the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and wider invasion of Ukraine putting further nails in that coffin.
Russia's interference in the political processes of the EU, UK, and USA has been well-documented. Cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and election meddling have been attributed to Russian actors. E.g. the UK government has exposed attempts by Russian intelligence services to interfere in UK politics, including cyber operations targeting parliamentarians and civil society organizations. Similarly, in the USA, Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election through social media manipulation and hacking has been widely reported. These actions aim to destabilize democratic institutions and sow discord among Western nations.
Moreover, Russia has been linked to high-profile assassinations on foreign soil. Cases like the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018 in the UK highlight the Kremlin's willingness to target individuals abroad. These are not signs of a country working reasonably and using self-defence only.
About the gas supplies, people seem to have very short memories. Russia was slow running its repairs to reduce gas supplies in 2022. Supplies are not reliable when Russia tries to extract political concessions by witholding supply. Once trust is lost, it is very difficult to regain, as the US will discover over the next decades. This was not the first time either, during the 2006 and 2009 gas disputes with Ukraine, supplies to Europe were disrupted by Russia.
I've been trying to gain a clear understanding on the carbon taxes applied to gas usage and how those taxes affect our bills.
You write that this tax is equivalent to £14.60 per MWh and only applies to gas used for generating electricity and not on gas used to power gas boilers. Is my understanding correct?
(I'm surprised that carbon tax wouldn't apply to all gas usage since gas is 'evil' and the govt wants to deter us from using gas boilers).
Just to give some context amongst the madness of net zero and our insane energy policies, Delivered by politicians who must surely have studied at the Heath Robinson Academy of Energy!
The Earth’s surface receives roughly **1.152 × 10²¹ joules of solar energy per hour on the sunlit side** (320,000 TWh × 3.6 × 10¹⁵ J/TWh), or **2.246 × 10²¹ joules globally averaged per hour** (624,000 TWh × 3.6 × 10¹⁵ J/TWh). For comparison, humanity’s total energy consumption in a year is about **5.76 × 10²⁰ joules** (160,000 TWh × 3.6 × 10¹⁵ J/TWh), meaning the Sun delivers vastly more energy in an HOUR than we use in a YEAR.
How much would we be paying for electricity if all subsidies paid to renewables plus the carbon tax were removed?
Many thanks for this info Mr Turver. The thing I don't understand (amongst many) is why the grid has these auctions and that sets the price. Why can folk not say 'I want to buy 100% unreliable (without the certificate fall backs) energy' and that be what they get, regardless of generation or cost. Another could say I want 100% nuclear and they get that.
Although that sounds rather too much like a market for the green agenda.
It's screaming that the entire energy market has been rigged to disguise the cost of unreliables, to create a smoke and mirrors of taxation (on reliable fuels) to make them artificially expensive. The state then slaps those taxes on 'the cost of gas' (because businesses do not pay taxes, customers do) .
Big fat state then hands that tax to unreliable sources to pretend they're cheaper than they are. Big government then creates all sorts of subsidy and payments (AR, CFDs) in various forms to disguise the utter unreliability, inefficiency and sheer cost of these not remotely 'green' deployments.
As I've said before, our house benefitted from an ECO4 grant (which is really just a tax rebate) and maybe my railing makes me a hypocrite, but prior to buying the house we were quoted for a gas pipeline. Most of us in the road would still like gas. I'd be happy to pay for the local connection but we couldn't afford the six figures for the main pipeline. The government, through legislation; removed that choice.
That seems to be the fundamental intent and source of the problem: the removal of choice and a farrago of tax and subsidy to disguise a thoroughly broken market where the customer loses out.
What happens when people simply can't afford energy? Rationing? Hang on - we're already there.
What is truly amazing is that the Government gets more income from 5 percent VAT than the suppliers do in profit. I had wondered why the old PES suppliers were coming out of supply. Now I understand.
It’s now cheaper to run your own petrol/diesel generator to power your home. If you can get red diesel it’s definitely cheaper!
Andrew Montford has done a piece about why the price of electricity is based on gas. I didn't understand it fully but it seemed to me that it amounted to another subsidy for renewables. If I understand correctly they add suppliers starting at the lowest price, usually wind. Finally they reach the highest price which is usually gas and that sets the wholesale price of electricity for that period for all suppliers. So that difference between the price they bid and the price they got must be a kind of bonus or subsidy. As it turns out, since the wholesale price is usually lower than the strike price they get subsidy on top of that again in the form of Cfds. Have I got this wrong?
The market no longer works like that, except for a slice of the day ahead market. Most electricity is sold via bilateral contracts between generators and traders and retailers that have prices set by the contracts. I wrote out a reasonably comprehensive description here (also see the follow up comments which add more clarity)
https://cloudwisdom.substack.com/p/will-net-zero-reduce-electricity/comment/97661288
That's interesting. Is there any public data I can use to back up what you say in that comment you linked to. For instance the terms of typical PPA agreements for renewables and the proportion of time interconnector prices set the market price. That might be an interesting subject for another article.
Prof Gordon Hughes has done analysis that he reported on here
https://cloudwisdom.substack.com/p/will-net-zero-reduce-electricity
There is more detail in the underlying report. Also read all the comments: Gordon expands on several points. And there are some other useful contributions 😊
I think there is quite a bit more analysis that could be added.
Can't help feeling that getting this illusion broken would help move the narrative on to the other costs drivers arising from renewables.
Great to see you speak to the full costs and illustrate how gas prices are not the main driver of electricity costs in the UK.
Thanks for the very helpful breakdown of the different components. No wonder the market is so challenging for many to navigate (customers and suppliers both.)
One area it would be interesting to see similar analysis of is the infrastructure costs - where are we now, what is proposed at transmission level and in current and emerging electricity distribution price controls. The costs of the infrastructure component are not really discussed and even less understood. Do you know if anyone has looked at this part of the system?
Ofgem are of course looking to accelerate depreciation of gas networks such that customers pay them off early from April 2026. How this runs into customers bills and meets the promises to reduce them by £300 will be interesting to watch.
A big chunk of the CP2030 costs are transmission and distribution infrastructure.
My take from the government propaganda is that yes building the infrastructure & windmills/solar is big money up front (not to mention the landscape destruction & loss of arable farmland), but the power it generates is free so it doesn’t matter. Not only are the costs enormous upfront capex but so few people (David an exception) will even talk about the actuality, maintenance , decommissioning & disposal & life span. It’s simply mind blowing. Someday in the future when we look round at all these broken bits of stuff littering the land it will seem odd.
As we've seen windmills and solar are very vulnerable to weather - hail and very strong winds.
As for free: when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining that cost still exists and the item isn't working. It's an employee sat idle, costing money.
Only in the mind of lunatic government could unreliables be considered rational. I think they're all completely mad, desperate to hide the true costs of their mania.
Why aren’t the ‘official opposition’ shouting this from the rooftops?
They're the nutjob idiots who forced the insanity of 'net zero' on us in the first place.
When Truss presented fracking she was removed. It's all a bit conspiracy theory-ish but the policies that would have created growth, undone the enforced decline of tax and waste and ended the green hegemony were swiftly dealt with and prevented from being enacted by defenestrating the government that presented them.
In the wake of destroying the pro-growth, no green agenda a high tax, big state chancellor and ineffectual PM were installed to ensure the decline continued.
TLDR: it's the blasted Tories' fault we're in this mess!
Agreed, but the UK’s present economic predicament offers the perfect political opportunity for a volte face.
Probably because they're responsible for most of it.
David, where do the costs to not supply to the grid go (i.e. when supply is greater than demand)?
I think they show up in balancing costs.
Correct. Wind curtailment payments are a very important element in balancing costs. REF has a nice summary of those here
https://ref.org.uk/constraints/index.php?tab=yr
Note that the volume of curtailment has been increasing rapidly as more wind capacity is added, but this also results in more competition for payment, particularly from newer wind farms whose terms give them no subsidy when prices are negative or who haven't commenced a CFD and therefore do not lose subsidy payments when prices are low and positive. Prices have collapsed. REF blogged the issue highlighting previous overcharging here
https://ref.org.uk/ref-blog/388-constraint-payment-price-drop
Of course the other side of the coin is the cost of other actions for balancing. So far we have relatively rarely reached the point at which wind is just surplus to demand (given must run nuclear and inertia providing CCGT), so much of the curtailed volume gets replaced by turning up CCGT in England. The curtailment is said to be due to transmission constraints- the lack of capacity so send power south from Scotland. However, if the constraints were eliminated under present grid operating rules there would still need to be a significant element of curtailment and replacement by CCGT ro ensure adequate inertia on the grid. NESO are busy trying to secure authorisation to operate the grid on a low inertia knife edge that would increase blackout risk and leave us dependent on batteries to handle grid upsets.
The other interplay is with interconnector trade. If you compare the full cost of renewables including subsidies it is almost always higher than the cost of imported power and of CCGT, so enabling more renewables increases consumer costs. Insult is added to injury where interconnectors are exporting highly subsidised renewables generation for the benefit of overseas consumers with the subsidy paid by British billpayers.
They do have the synchronous condensers and some grid forming batteries which are being used in lieu of CCGTs although or do wonder how it will all react under a big system outage situation as we saw back in 2019 there were unintended outcomes.
I gather from Kathryn Porter's blog that the Norwegians aren't exactly chuffed about interconnectors: https://watt-logic.com/2025/02/21/norway-turning-away-from-electricity-interconnection/
Constraint payments
Excellence as usual on a Sunday morning - thank you David. I watched Mr Ward and the Latin phrase "Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses" sprang instantly to mind. I first came across it on Yes Prime Minister many years ago - I hope it provides some amusement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beuKfLn8a6c
My monthly energy bills are now higher than my monthly mortgage payments. This is despite the fact that, according to the handy energy usage graph my utilities company provides, I am using /less/ energy than last year or the year before. Thankfully I only have a few more months to put up with this, not because of seasonal change (British soggy summers mean heating in August), but because I have had enough and am selling the house, to move to France where, as I’ve read recently, by contrast electricity bills are due to come down.
For the French to have lower cost electricity, they must have an awful lot of cheap wind and solar generation - oh wait, maybe it's nuclear.
Net Zero sits like a lead weight on nearly all our lives ( save those at airy top of the pile) It is the one horse race the UK government is determined to win at speed. The 'horse' has given itself a set of blinkers it refuses to have removed.
The electrification of society is not the cheap option, and when those huge data centres are built for the 'AI- ification' of society how is electricity to ever be cheaper than gas, oil. Electricity will be gobbled up by these power hungry sources, so the citizens of the UK are being conditioned to accept rationing, 'demand pricing'. Electricity on tap so to speak will become a luxury item fewer and fewer will be able to afford. How does that square with 'electric Ed Milliband's 'cheaper bills' and only by a measly £350 a year.....not even £30 a month. When will the last fence be jumped? When will the horse be on its knees? When will it go to the knacker's yard? I don't suppose electric Ed will care, likely retired in a cosy stable, House of Lords. Lord Wattage of Outtage.
No one wants to accept rationing. It'll be forced on us. I think at that point either there will be a diaspora of lies spewed out by the Left or riots.
Lord Wattage of Outage - love it!
Thanks. Yes....it ( rationing) will be forced and probably on the back of a slogan like 'Keep Britain Fired Up'. It will be the population fired up!
The UK government's policy of waging undeclared war against Russia - along with the rest of NATO and the EU - has deliberately deprived us of the cheapest and most reliable sources of oil and gas.
More and more ordinary Russians are now making angry remarks online about how the world would be better off if the British Isles were destroyed.
While Russia cannot actually remove the UK from the map, it can - with relatively little effort - render them permanently uninhabitable. But our insouciant rulers seem completely oblivious.
You have it the wrong way around. Russia's policy to to wage undeclared war against NATO and the EU. The gas and oil supply from Russia never was reliable from that perspective, as history has clearly shown. Resilience is key and will be going forward, in energy, manufacturing and defense. Rely on one source at your peril in this deglobalising world.
"Russia's policy to to wage undeclared war against NATO and the EU".
Evidence? Until about 2008, the Russian government was eager to cooperate as closely as possible with the West. They even requested formally to be allowed to join NATO - a request that was rudely rejected.
It is quite true that Russia decided, no later than 2008, that the West led by the USA had the very worst intentions towards Russia. (I don't know why it took them so long - it was glaringly obvious right from 1990). At that point Mr Putin decided that Russia should rearm and prepare to defend itself, which it has done quite effectively.
Russia would be quite content to ignore NATO, the EU, and the USA if they were not so outspoken about their hostile intentions. Russia can thrive as a part of Asia, trading with almost everyone outside the "Golden Billion".
Of course, devious and manipulative Westerners have perfected the art of portraying reasonable and moderate measure of self-defence as aggression.
"The gas and oil supply from Russia never was reliable from that perspective, as history has clearly shown".
Please supply evidence in support of that untrue claim. The USSR and Russia have never interrupted supplies except when that was done by Westerners - e.g. the destruction of Nord Stream by the US armed forces.
Russian fuel has always been not only the cheapest, but the most reliable. Unlike, for example, the USA, which is likely to threaten cutting off supplies at any time in order to get its way.
Funny you mention 2008 as the point at which Russia was earge to cooperate with the West. The invasion of Georgia, conducted by Russia was incompatible with the West's values and alliances so there was no way any cooperation could be that close after that. This was followed up by the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and wider invasion of Ukraine putting further nails in that coffin.
Russia's interference in the political processes of the EU, UK, and USA has been well-documented. Cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and election meddling have been attributed to Russian actors. E.g. the UK government has exposed attempts by Russian intelligence services to interfere in UK politics, including cyber operations targeting parliamentarians and civil society organizations. Similarly, in the USA, Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election through social media manipulation and hacking has been widely reported. These actions aim to destabilize democratic institutions and sow discord among Western nations.
Moreover, Russia has been linked to high-profile assassinations on foreign soil. Cases like the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018 in the UK highlight the Kremlin's willingness to target individuals abroad. These are not signs of a country working reasonably and using self-defence only.
About the gas supplies, people seem to have very short memories. Russia was slow running its repairs to reduce gas supplies in 2022. Supplies are not reliable when Russia tries to extract political concessions by witholding supply. Once trust is lost, it is very difficult to regain, as the US will discover over the next decades. This was not the first time either, during the 2006 and 2009 gas disputes with Ukraine, supplies to Europe were disrupted by Russia.
Russia is not an innocent and nor is it a victim.
Is grid balancing and backup costs the same as capacity costs?
Backup comes from the capacity market