Tom Haddon

Wonderful stuff. Not a quote/joke I was aware of, but definitely stealing it.

I am really happy to report that Kathryn Porter is still going strong and adding countries to her 'black out prediction' tombola machine at a healthy rate.

It might be a volatile world out there, but at least we can find stability somewhere.

Also I do enjoy the initial opening that *this* gas price crisis proves the economic case of renewables.

Think it might have been the last one, personally, which didn't really finish before this one started.

The Iran oil crisis has proved Ed Miliband right on green energy. But households still need more help | Mathew Lawrence Britain’s whole energy economy needs to be reformed – decarbonising the grid is only part of the mix, says director of Common Wealth, Mathew Lawrence

Wow, an article that says to 'break the link', and then explains how that would be done. Big admiration for that, I do not have to tap the sign!

The idea needs interrogation (a mix of market bifurcation with an 'Iberian exception' twist?), but fair play.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

History doesn't repeat. It just moves to other commodity markets.

I'm not sure this is going to be an energy price 'spike' shaped crisis, guys.

Going to have to go dust off the 'table mountain' analogies & 'high energy price plateau' explanations on this report.

Now you know why oil producers really don't want this to continue.

bsky.app/profile/tomh...

Many areas of the world experienced this in gas just a couple of years ago. Europe was writing (state funded) blank cheques like it was going out of fashion, and places like Pakistan couldn't get an LNG shipment as the ability to pay evaporated.

Wonder want happened there? Read below...

Very insightful - thanks very much.

So the closure of Groningen kicked them that way. Makes sense, almost a lesson to be learnt for GB in return....if only.

That's interesting - what's going on with our friends in the Netherlands?

Famously like a mini GB in that they found gas (albeit onshore for the Dutch) at just about the same time and both went gas for heating...so striking to be so different considering similar systems.

I know what you mean, but any casual reader just thinks you are a bot who has malfunctioned.

Don't forget the BM is highly geographic as well as temporal. There will be plenty of occasions whereby a very small band of capacity (probably in the South East) hold the key to overall system operation...and they will know it.

NESO has a habit of skipping over BESS even if they bid/offer at the cheapest prices compared to gas gen because broadly NESO doesn't trust/know it can deliver at the time it says it can (i.e. state of charge visibility for example).

It's changing but slower than we would like.

You have just opened pandora's box.

In theory BESS could do almost* all within day balancing (if deployed in the right places at the right volumes etc) but struggle to get to the front of queue

*you likely want some high inertia type dispatchable gen on the system, or synchronous condensers

And because you have only a small number of gas plant to do specific things for the system operator - the worry is they will extract surplus 'rent' from the balancing market in future (arguably deploying excess market power now).

More renewables mean more balancing actions (volumes increasing about 5 TWh per annum), and then gas will eventually switch almost fully to earning revenue in balancing as wholesale ceases to be a functioning market for dispatchable >95% of the time.

The point is, gas will still set the price even if you don't set the market up that way because of the obvious bidding behaviour that occurs.

Balancing costs ~£2.5bn p.a so not much more than like £40-50 per household per annum (rest is met by businesses) but will increase because...

I don't think he is on BlueSky (used to be on Twitter) but that is a yellow card to Nigel Pocklington (CEO, Good Energy) on LBC Radio just now.

Simon seems to think there are considerations that can't be captured in a spreadsheet. I believe he has never encountered *my* spreadsheets before.

Assuming the wind farm has a 25 year life is a bit off.

45 years is the going rate now with the power of predictive O&M.

Might push the wind farm numbers a bit down even more then and help your argument further.

Why did the oil hit mum? This has gone a bit dark.

It's why CfDs were such a upgrade in thinking. Right now, reference prices are up to £100-£120/MWh.

It significantly decreases the total bill to overall strike price, and some (AR4 solar PV) will be paying ~£50/MWh back.

Could have just done with the AR4 wind online, too.

About a month ago, DESNZ decided how it was going to try and cool the returns to Renewable Obligation backed renewables (broadly they receive wholesale + an additional ROC payment).

It looks awful now RO assets are going through another cycle of creaming increased wholesale returns.

She did this when Putin kicked off too.

That's evidence right there. God might be from Yorkshire, but Mother Nature is pan European (within limits).

Dunno what you're all so worried about, you know Mother Nature is European, right? She'll sort us out.

Oh look, warm and windy weather coming from the 11th.

Enough of this nonsense she says, just all this fuss is too much.

Not to be flippant but: gas.

Then eventually, long duration storage (hydrogen, pumped storage, biogas, BESS, compressed air etc) - but not for sometime.

Don't get me wrong - it was feasible, just not comparatively optimal vs the alternatives.

The alternatives being, in an emergency, pump as much money as you like through CfD auction rounds, and allow the networks to spend, spend, spend and you could crash build capacity just as quickly.

Where they wanted to come ashore as well would have created some fairly difficult system management effects (not a huge amount of demand to satisfy in Cornwall with a 3 GW connection) baking in further costs.

What I'm trying to say is it wasn't 'dismissed', it was very flawed.

X-Links was a bit mad though, and was also just trying to secure a government backed revenue stream to provide funding for the cable production facility (which we do need the cable capacity).

Government providing a CfD for generation in Morocco does bring a few questions.