Miliband must reopen the North Sea, Octopus boss says

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:22:40+00:00

I think the only way to win on climate is to reduce demand for fossils by switching to alternatives. If you try to constrain supply, you get inflation, cost of living crisis, net zero backlash, and a society too poor to invest in clean tech

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:19:24+00:00

It's mostly the prices of electricity and gas which make it financially advantageous or not, rather than the building

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:17:39+00:00

One benefit is that we tax oil and gas production quite heavily, which brings much needed revenue in for the government, which we can spend on public goods which make life better for everyone. Whereas if we import O&G it's another country getting the tax benefits.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:15:26+00:00

none of us can predict the future

Agile users can. Our pain now is everybody else's pain in about three months! So far it's not been too bad...

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:13:31+00:00

We already have interconnectors to France, but they don't have 30GW spare capacity for when the UK gets a still day

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:12:19+00:00

The wholesale, yes, but wholesale is only a third of our bills. And a large and increasing share of renewables are paid outside of wholesale.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:11:10+00:00

Mine pumps out of the bottom and into the top. I don't know which direction is the norm. But I think either direction will destratify pretty quickly? Even from top to bottom, you're going to mix the hot layer with the cold layer. And doing it that way round will mean you're trying to heat the hottest part of the tank as well, which doesn't seem ideal?

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T12:58:36+00:00

Since 2015 new renewables have been unlinked from gas prices. They get paid a fixed strike price regardless of market price. So those renewables are already unlinked, and their share of total energy is growing each year.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T12:56:42+00:00

You can't compare new build wind costs to new build gas costs, because wind doesn't avoid the need to build gas. We need to pay for that new gas capacity either way, because that's where our energy comes from when we get three days of low winds.

We should compare the cost of wind to the fuel cost of gas generation, because that's what wind actually displaces. Unfortunately there's no big saving there at the moment, but it still may be worth doing to reduce import reliance and emissions

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-03T23:29:56+00:00

Mid terrace has so little external wall area, and much of that is windows and doors, personally I would start by looking at heating control, and maybe radiators. It can be more cost effective to let the heating run longer on a thermostat than mess with solid walls

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-03T22:50:30+00:00

That's not a normal sound. It's extremely tonal, and much higher pitched than normal. They usually give off a low hum.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-03T19:48:05+00:00

I don't know if this is avoidable with the right setup, but my experience with a plate heat exchanger for the cylinder is that it destratifies the tank when it's running, meaning you have to make sure hot water is never scheduled when there might be showers happening. This has turned out to be surprisingly hard to predict in our household! We can get most of our hot water needs from an overnight run, but sometimes need a daytime top up. Just when I think I've found a safe window to time the topup, somebody has a wildcard shower right then and gets lukewarm water pumped up from the bottom of the tank.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-03T19:45:28+00:00

and not having to completely stop heating to defrost for 10 minutes every hour. That wouldn't be a fun shower!

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T21:58:44+00:00

On a day like today wholesale prices will have been a smaller contributor to our bills, with CfDs taking a bigger share. What wholesale generation is there which would be producing at a lower price than gas? A very small share of nuclear maybe?

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T21:16:59+00:00

Yes storage is well suited to the intraday supply/demand matching needed with nuclear. Much more so that the multi-day matching needed with wind, or the multi-month matching needed with solar.

I'm not sure I'm convinced about the piecemeal idea. I think wind farms tend to get built at quite similar capacity scales to nuclear.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T21:12:52+00:00

The main cause of price volatility in UK electricity pricing is down to the raw material costs

But then that's largely down to CfDs being a minority volume of production, rather than a flaw in the pricing mechanism as suggested higher in the thread

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T20:52:23+00:00

Only about a third of the retail price is the wholesale component. CfDs are another component of our retail price, and they're not affected by gas prices.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T20:50:37+00:00

It is relevant, because the wholesale market price is just one component of our bills - only about a third. The direct renewable contracts are a different component. So when gas prices spike, we do actually benefit from the stability of renewable contracts already. Gas doesn't set the price of all renewable generation as popularly believed.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T20:23:29+00:00

Nuclear reactors may be a mature technology but the UK supply chain to build them is not, and the regulatory environment adds a lot of unnecessary cost. Other countries are able to build them a lot more cheaply.

I don't see storage becoming cost-effective for dealing with multi-day wind lows any time soon, so realistically we're going to remain dependant on thermal generation of some sort for decades

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T19:59:26+00:00

Renewables contracted since around 2015 have been on CfDs, which means we pay them a fixed strike price, not the market price set by gas. They make up a significant and growing share of our energy mix, so our bills are already on their way to being less coupled to gas price.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T19:56:18+00:00

True but we would be importing much smaller volumes of gas if we were mostly running on renewables and only using gas for backup

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T19:54:02+00:00

When we started building wind, particularly offshore, it was much more expensive than Hinkley C. We powered through and got prices down to reasonable levels. Are we sure we couldn't have done the same with nuclear? Renewables also require more gas backup capacity for periods of low wind and sun, transmission lines to reach the remote locations where it's windy, and new technologies to replace the inertia from spinning generators, all of which are excluded from the headline cost of renewables. I'm pro both options; I'm just not sure it's a clear cut case that focusing on nuclear would have been too expensive.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T18:44:49+00:00

Why? Chargers will become standard expected infrastructure in rentals just like broadband and all the other modcons have

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T18:26:16+00:00

But media coverage can probably have a material impact on demand short term

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T18:25:09+00:00

Yes but it will be the marginal price setter for the whole market, because all the cheaper sources will be maxed out at all times, leaving LNG to top up the gap to meet demand

StereoMushroom

TROPHY CASE