The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

1. Gas-powered electricity generation sets the wholesale rate (for _all_ forms of generation) more often than not, and gas is expensive, especially after we had to find alternative sources in order to punish Russia for invading Ukraine.

2. Other than the wholesale rate, we need to _build_ all this clean energy, we need to attract investment, and it's our promise to pay for that CapEx over 15-20 years (the strike price) that we'll be paying for in our bills once gas is out of the picture, moreso than the actual cost of generation.

Also, Tories in 2023 failed to attract any investment, no capacity added: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344

Whereas Labour in 2025: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o

... we will find out if this worked, after the auction is finished and they announce the results (around November 2025 - February 2026)

That's just the media. No interest in making things actually work, just in covering the fight, and quite often sponsored by fossil fuel backers or weird overseas media monopolists.

I would say that improving transmission seems like a much better solution but again I think zonal pricing can help there as it could then be more easily sold to the public as being able to import the cheaper (say) Scottish energy to your local zone, whereas at the moment there's no apparent direct cost associated with blocking pylon projects forever.

The only part of municipal/ regional bus network that is suitable for privatisation in a high labour cost country is contracting out operations. Ticketing, route planning andscheduling all should be under a central governmental authority. There is a reason that, outside of London, England has some of the worst bus services in the developed world

What population growth?

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population...

Is this really true in the UK? Electricity production in the UK peaked in 2005. It's down 20% on that today. The issue here is that in 2005 electricity was primarily produced in large power stations reasonably close to where it was consumed, while in 2025 it's increasingly produced in locations far from population centres. The actual ability of the grid to deliver power to the last mile isn't really a problem. The problem is that most of the houses are in the South, and increasingly large amounts of generation are in the North.

Europe has not been 'hit by a very large population growth' by any stretch of the imagination in recent years. Capacity issues are mostly due to deprecating natural gas, which has lead to an increase in solar, but that's just a minor issue when you look at industry migrating from furnaces to heat pumps.

> Just like water and housing

Water is squarely an agriculture thing and housing has been a shitshow forever. But thanks for bringing those up as well -- it's like a dogwhistle trifecta!

> state-enforced price caps, state-mandated net zero rules

Most parts of Europe lack those entirely. There are (less and less) 'green subsidies', sure, but funnily enough, the increasing cost of fossil fuels is doing most of the work here.

Councils certainly would be easier to negotiate?

Depending on which research you believe, only 25% of homes don't have a dedicated space - https://www.field-dynamics.co.uk/25-drivers-no-off-street-pa... and https://www.racfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/standing_st...

Lots of local authorities are installing on-street charging.

Basically, the vast majority of people in the UK do have off-street parking. Running a cable to a garage or from a street-lamp isn't overly expensive. Those who park on public streets also have lots of options for charging.

We DO need to solve for it though, because it's ridiculously cheap to drive an EV in the UK if you can have an L2 charger installed (2p per mile versus 20p per mile for even an efficient diesel/petrol car) and that should be made available to all.

Is the solution chargers in every lamp post? Or on every off-street parking, with billing tied back to your energy provider (allowing you to use smart tariffs like Intelligent Octopus Go)?

By a process of elimination, we determine that they must be using on-street parking other than near their house. Which is one of those sneaky subsidies that people don't even realise is a subsidy, a little area of publicly owned land that you can use without having to pay rent on.

For central London, where I've lived for most of the last decade, yeah, there aren't a lot of parking spots per household, but that's also going to be true in NYC or any other built up older city. As for newer developments, I suspect they get more parking than older ones. My Victorian block has none.

As always, London is not the UK. Outside London it seems good in well off areas for EVs, and, of course, bad in the neglected rest of the UK.

But as public transport is electrified, it is perfect to be incorporated into the grid. Vehicles follow predicted schedules, they are used in a predictable way from the depots, so charging can be optimized, and knowing their schedule, the charge on the battery can be kept optimized as well.

https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-electricity-py...

Of course, the same arguments killed the construction of onshore wind in England, which would have prevented needing the new powerlines (or at least not so much).

> installing wind wherever they can without regard for the local infrastructure and demand

Alternatively, installing it where the energy and topography is, and the local planning environment allows it. We wouldn't be in quite such a bad position if the Tory government hadn't banned onshore wind in England.

And with cell chemistry that is more resilient to charge and discharge cycles (LFP) coming to fruition in the last 5 years (and at a lower cost than NMC) it makes sense that we're only now seeing large-scale investment - the yield curve has hit the sweet spot.

Learned helplessness in the political class has more to do with it, I think.

In Australia the same firm is vocal that unless the local area moves from coal to renewables they won't hit price points that are competitive on the global market.

It's just weird numerology that gets people hung up on these numbers. It's not clear people even understand what they mean when they bring them up.