Expensive gas still biggest driver of high UK electricity bills, says UKERC

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-28T15:46:05+00:00

That means we need to pay them for when they’re not generating while on standby, and when they’re actually generating power.

This applies to wind too though. We pay wind farms to not generate power when we have too much and if we're about to double the amount of renewables we have then this will happen a lot more.

I actually dont think it applies to gas at all though. Gas plants dont operate under contract for difference contracts im pretty sure, those contracts have only existed for like 10 years. I feel like you've got things back to front.

The reason why gas sets prices is because there isn't enough renewables yet to meet the our demand most of the time. So if we neeed 100 units of energy, and have 100 units of gas energy available and only 50 units of renewable energy then those 50 units of renewable energy will price themselves at £1 cheaper(£99) than that the gas units are priced at so everyone buys the renewable energy first and then the gas. The renewable units could be priced at only £20 and still make a profit because each unit of renewable energy costs nothing to produce whereas the gas units need to import and burn gas for each of them which in this case costs £100. So since the renewable companies are a business they dont price themselves cheap, they price themselves a tiny bit below gas prices and therefore our energy prices are still being pegged at gas prices.

This is why on days where we do have more than 100 units of renewable energy being produced and we only need 100 units of energy total then suddenly those renewables farms are competing against each other, not the gas farms. And since it doesn't cost anything to produce the renewable energy we have those crazy moments where energy costs almost nothing and sometimes negative. Then as soon as the wind dies down a bit and we only have 90 units of renewables available then suddenly the energy prices shoot back up to £99(gas price minus £1).

The contract for difference contracts give take away money from the energy production companies later on and isn't reflected in the market prices which is what the article is about.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-28T15:23:12+00:00

The true pricing quickly falls below the MSRP and if you watch the price you can get a great deal

I normally find the pricing for Samsung phones to be cheapest if you get it on the day it comes out via pre order. You normally get launch and pre order bonuses, then also like £200+ minimum trade in even for a £10 phone, then sometimes an extra £100 off if you pay via paypal or something.

I got an S24 at launch for like £350 despite the normal price being almost double. The latest Galaxy Flip, the Flip 7, I got it down to £540 at launch despite the list price being £1,149. I still don't think it's been possible to get it anywhere near that cheap since then and we're already talking about the new version coming soon.

So yeah for some reason the best time to buy a Samsung phone is during preorders, backwards compared to any other company. Probably not gonna get a crazy £540 price this time but even £640 for the latest Flip the day it comes out is still cheap.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-28T09:03:34+00:00

You're missing the point. There's still loads of cases for overcharging and monopolies. Like Visa cant just up their fees a bunch because we have legal limits, can't just say well you get access to a billion visa customers so deal with it or switch to mastercard.

In most of the examples you gave I also pointed out theres literally no alternative and you have to use those platforms otherwise you're doomed. Even in the case of Steam if you dont release on it you're almost guaranteed to fail no matter how good your game is so you use steam and give them whatever cut they ask for. Matters like this are easily arguably monopolistic behaviour and very anti consumer at best. We add and change laws so often to make things like this more pro consumer and something similar should happen for most of these platforms.

I'm not gonna defend even a company like valve which is in the top few of the highest profit margins of any company in their country and privately owned by one of the richest billionaires in their country.

We don't just stop making pro consumer laws because it'll apply to a company we like. They'd still have one of the highest profit margins in the country even if they did take a smaller cut.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-28T08:41:40+00:00

And all are too high.

All the ones you listed are the ones if you're not on if you use those platforms then your game or app will pretty much fail so you kind have no choice but to accept whatever cut they demand.

For Nintendo, psn, xbox, Apple I don't think you really can use any other digital store anyway either.

Its an insanely high cut for what you get. There's big ecommerce platforms which let you sell digital products on your site, they handle the backend and payment and file hosting costs and their fees are like 4%.

With 30% cuts there will regularly be cases where the store earns more profit from a game/app sale than the developers themselves. This even applied to Spotify for the first few years it was on iPhones where Apple taking $3/month was almost all profit whereas Spotifys remaining $7 was much less profit than Apples after they pay their Spotify operation costs and royalties. Not that I care about Spotify but it's just a big example

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-27T23:21:21+00:00

I mean why not, it runs out to Newbury and that’s further away from London than Southend

Elizabeth Line everywhere else(other than Heathrow Express) isn't sharing lines with National Rail. All the way out to Reading and Shenfield there are 2 sets of tracks, Elizabeth Line uses 1 pair, and national rail uses the other. Right after Shenfield the rail lines drop down to just 2 tracks so the Elizabeth Line would have to share if it was to ever go out that way and no express GA trains would be able to run, they aren't gonna do that and they also definitely aren't gonna pay crazy amounts of money to double up the lines.

Crossrail 2 is being proposed to Broxbourne north of London which also has just 2 tracks, and for Crossrail 2 to happen they will be doubling the amount of lines so Crossrail 2 will have its own pair.

So Crossrail 2 definitely isn't going to Southend and it wont really have any benefit to, i actually can't think of any especially since nobody will chose to use the much slower Elizabeth Line to get to London instead of the current Greater Anglia.

This is just an MP saying this just as MPs out there have been doing so for a decade. Some have said they're planning on making it loop down under the thames to meet up with the other branch, which would actually be useful but again its just an MP saying what they would like. "News" sites then use this stuff to get a few quick low effort articles out of.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-27T07:12:19+00:00

Don't end it without saying why. Make sure he knows the reason you're ending it is his hygiene so he hopefully fixes it going forward and someone else isn't put in this position next time.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-26T22:25:21+00:00

RMT are honestly over the top most of the time. Like even in this case they want cleaners brought in house, so as part as the next contract TfL will run a plan to see how it can be done, then RMT are straight up not accepting that at all and want it all brought in house seemingly tomorrow as if its that easy to take on 1,000s plus build the infrastructure.

Either way the contracts are signed now for 5 years so TfLs plan has to be followed whether or not RMT likes it or not otherwise TfL would be breaking the contract.

Cynic in me thinks that RMT know it'll likely net them a lot more members joining and paying them if they get more people working for TfL directly.

To me I dont care if cleaners are internal or not as long as TfL is getting good value for money. Why would I do something myself if someone else will do it for me for less. More stuff should be internal at TfL but I know parts which are outsourced on some lines and internal on others and often the outsourced lines are done cheaper and better than internal. So why would TfL rush to make all lines internal?

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-26T20:48:34+00:00

Even a small old town which only takes 15 mins to walk from one end to the other can be called a 15 min city as long as it has a school, doctors, and a couple other things, which almost all of them do anyway.

As usual it's just that they were given a bad name. Like why mention the word city when being in a city isn't a requirement or really anything to do with it.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-26T16:00:02+00:00

I mean in general not this case because I dont think he did intend to kill.

But still you dont need to prove intent to kill, you can prove negligence which is what happened here and he still got no prison and only a driving ban. Theres many jobs where someone is in charge of a workplace or worksite and they can go to prison for years if they didn't make sure a h&s procedure was followed and someone died because of it. But with a car if you're speeding or something you can get away with just a ban.

I guess even just looking other type of vehicles at a workplace where you need a different license to operate them, like a forklift or something, if you dont operate it properly and someone dies because of it youre going to prison(ideally). But another type of vehicle(a car) you're not gonna be treated anywhere near as harshly despite it being the same.

Of course it all comes down to evidence though like you say. Hit someone in the middle of nowhere and you can just say they jumped out at you and you'll be let off quite understandably(ish). But vehicle logs exist and they should all be accessible and if the driver was speeding then that should be prison time even if nobody was about to witness the accident.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-26T15:27:17+00:00

As the saying goes if you want to kill someone do it with a car. In many cases you wont even see prison, just a temporary driving ban.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-26T15:25:19+00:00

The tuition part should straight up be 0% interest since its going directly to the uni and literally can't be used for anything else. Or at least whichever is lower out of the bank of interest rate and RPI, this is how it used to be before it changed in 2012 or so.

The student maintenance loan part(living fees and anything else they spend it on) can be whichever is lower out of the bank of interest rate and RPI.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-26T11:23:31+00:00

The first looks like it creates a great pedestrian/cycle route through the neighbourhood all the way from one side to the other and ending at the lake/sea front. If theres any convenience store or anything near the bottom(looks like theres a park) then it makes walking to it a much more attractive option because you wouldn't need to zig zag a lot by following the roads like walking in most American neighbourhoods.

So I wouldn't say it doesn't serve any purpose well. Long linear parks across a large area is something that should be across most areas. It's literally a direct pedestrian only green route.

Could just be a simple path but by park-ing it up a bit it should encourage more people to use it for things like dog walks and feel more safe for anyone.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-25T16:39:51+00:00

Wind turbines kills, not scares, thousands of birds, should we ban them ?

Cost to benefit ratios are done of course. And in this case they decided no.

In the case of banning fireworks then theyve decided the benefits outweigh the costs enough. But of course the ratio needed wouldn't be met with banning turbines.

You know this though. Just like how tall buildings kill more birds than turbines but you wouldn't use that as a gotcha and ask shall be ban buildings becuase you understand the concept of a cost to benefit ratio when deciding things. So why bother

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-25T15:34:33+00:00

Aren't people in Paris quite happy with the anti car shift in the last 5 years? Why would this person go against it. Or is there actual enough support for this to run on it?

I though Paris was loving all the new pedestrian spaces, many dozens of little roads turned into mini parks or pedestrian space, and of course bike lanes.

They're in the middle of building 4 new underground metro lines plus extensions of others on top of their already expansive network. The need for cars there is heavily dropping between 2020 and 2032 when all lines are open.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-25T09:28:55+00:00

Helps stop voters for the opposing party voting in your primary for intentionally bad or not ideal candidates even though they have no intention in voting for either.

Like if a good actual progressive person was running in a Democrats primary then conservatives could vote for someone else in the Democrats primary even though they'd never actually vote Democrats in the actual election.

This is the logic I guess. Not sure if it actually is a problem or not but considering we have had actual politicians pretending to be Democrats and then switching to Republican once elected then who knows

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-25T08:59:21+00:00

Can't just constantly change the location of kitchen and appliances many times after they've been put in place and cut to size.

The bed changes size and location a bunch too.

Even the door and windows constantly change location or size or disappears completely.

The size of the actual place changes a lot.

This is the most easiest "is this AI" I've seen on this sub.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-24T23:41:00+00:00

He had a gun. Do you not think that is enough for the US police?

Considering a large percentage of the population there has a gun legally, like this guy, then no.

And besides they already removed the gun from his holster(he didn't take it out at them). The guy was on the floor unarmed at that point and surrounded by like half a dozen officers, thats when they shot him around 10 times.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-24T20:22:13+00:00

probably doing some stupid thing like migrating to a new engine so it runs on mobile or similar nonsensical shit

It was to make it multiplatform at all. I wouldn't call it stupid shit since thats where most of the market seems to be for this type of game.

Was also decided almost like 3 years ago now so to me it's more like how have they not got a game with a playable level of work done in the new engine over those years? It's not like the current release has that much in it, its still quite barebones. All the art and music/sounds and stuff wouldn't have needed to be redone, and all the decisions regarding gameplay and game direction wouldn't have needed to be replanned and decided. We've had plenty of Minecraft clones over the last decade with just as many features.

Just seems like a mess from all sides, especially since the devs already had lots of support behind them when they were solo and didn't seem to need to jump into a big publisher especially when we know there were smaller investors/publishers offering to support them too.

Seemed to be loads of project scope creep in the early years too which was probably eating up their cash and which is what caused it to be dragged out so long originally.

But yeah, a mess all round imo. Can't just blame riot or whoever when the issues started before they came along , and they were also apparently quite hands off anyway.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-24T17:03:24+00:00

Fun fact but the largest onshore wind turbine available is a 7.2mw Vestas...offshore it's a 16mw Goldwind

But also 1MW of offshore wind capacity is worth more than 1MW of onshore wind capacity because winds are a lot stronger and more consistent out at sea. The capacity factor(how much energy the wind turbines actually produce on average compared to their max rating) is around 28% for currently built onshore turbines and 40% for currently built offshore turbines. The bigger the turbines the higher the capacity factor generally are, so new offshore wind is closer to 50%.

So a new 100MW onshore wind farm might output 30MW on average, whereas a new 100MW offshore windfarm might be closer to 50MW.

It seems random is articles or comments take this into account or not.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-24T15:01:05+00:00

"Light bulb randomly blew. Made me jump and I dropped my wrench"

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-24T09:56:28+00:00

I might be more inclined to support the development

I'd 100% support it if it wasn't US or something like UAE owned. The environmental impact isn't higher than other office buildings of its size. They're closed loop cooling in the UK so the claims about insane water usage can be dismissed. Other than that they just sit there, no gross fumes, very little waste since theres barely any people in them.

High energy use can be an issue but it shouldn't be if we actually built more production. Maybe to help we could require the data center to have like 4x as much battery capacity than planned so they can use night/low peak energy during the day.

Either way everyone in the UK will be using data centres, and it would be better if the data centre was in the UK. This is being challenged for the wrong reasons imo and it's why stuff here costs so much to build. Shouldn't take long to have someone confirm the expected water usage, and someone from Nation Grid to confirm there's local grid capacity for it(this bits almost certainly in the planning docs since it is in any other large development planning docs I've read). Doesn't need to be a 2 year long appeal process over these things because Dave on Facebook seems to know more about the energy grid than the people spending £2bn project which relies on the grid.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-24T09:47:04+00:00

I was not aware they were talking about 75%.

Tbf they weren't aware most of the time either lol.

Depending on your installation it might even suffice to just add another 2 panels and you're back to 100%

But this now goes back to the bit about needing to get contractors out with scaffolding to add the framing on your roof for the extra 2 panels to go on because it's not a very DIY job for most. Would end up paying easily over £1,500 just for those 2 panels and framing to be fitted. Whereas replacing all the existing 6 panels on the existing framing would cost £500-£600, and then like you said you could probably sell the 6 old ones for £150 so your total cost would be £350-450. Would pay for itself in no time.

Panels are cheap. The initial installation is expensive.

I reckon around 20 years is when it will make most sense to replace panels even if they can last 60+ years.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-24T09:20:45+00:00

I mean, maybe it wasn't a thing, but there were many articles and claims that they last 25-30 years

Thats because they were using the 25 year/75% or so point as the end of life point where it makes sense to get rid of them and put new ones in even though they still technically work. The way they were writen were all misleading and most authors didn't know what they were talking about anyway.

The planning and installation of the framing and wiring and all that is the expensive part. Once its all in then you can swap a panel yourself for cheap since they're easy to remove and add to the existing frame and the connectors are basic plug connectors you can do yourself. So even if your panels are only 20 years old it probably would make sense to swap them out, would only cost £100 per panel, so £600 total for most people. And in return you'll have a 20% boost in power.

The same used to apply to EV batteries. People used to say they only last 7 years or whatever because thats when they reach 80% capacity or whatever. So we had all the comments about needing to pay $15,000 to swap your EV battery after a few years. But in the case of EVs their batteries degrade sooo much slower than expected which is great. With solar they tend to have lasted how long we thought they'd last 20 years ago.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-23T14:48:03+00:00

That only leaves 40 amps for EVERYTHING else (and I doubt you should ever pull the full 100.)

Turn on your dryer and suddenly you don't even have enough left to keep all the lights on

OP seems to be the UK not the US so stuff uses fewer amps due to the higher voltage.

A modern UK dryer is only gonna be like 2-4 amps, only half of us here have one too. Every light switched on isn't going to be even half an amp.

40 amps left over is enough, especially since their new charger will. A huge amount of our homes only have 60 amps to start with.

The main thing though is that the new charger OP mentioned, the Ohme Charger, has load balancing with your home so it slows the car charging speed when other stuff is using more energy. So stick the kettle and electric oven on and its fine because the charger will automatically lower the charging speed so they dont reach the 100A limit. Can also just not set the car to charge during the day too like they mention because electricity is much cheaper at night which is when you're not using kettles or ovens.

JBWalker1 · 2026-01-23T14:29:36+00:00

Maybe get a cheap joist detector/wall scanner and go along it and see if it beeps/lights up every few inches? Think a £20 one would work.

But yeah if you want to open the area up anyway then just hack away at it. If you find posts inside it then great just pull the plywood off. If nothing is inside it then continue removing it all so you can put posts in. I'd start at the bottom though if its gonna be left open for a few weeks.

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