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Endjinneer posted:This sewage thing, has there been a recent change in volumes discharged or is this a weird tipping point when people overnight become deeply opposed to something that's been happening since humans built houses. Combined Sewer Overflows discharging sewage into rivers have been a thing since public sewers was first put in place. How it's supposed to work is that if storm drains directly feed into the sewer system, you can't control the amount of water going in to the sewers when it rains, so you have to store the excess water while you process it. If the storage fills up, it's a choice between allowing (rain water diluted) sewage into rivers, or allowing that same sewage to back up the system and come out of the toilets and drains in people's homes. The first option is the less bad of the two. Water companies are regulated monopolies, and Ofwat sets the amount of money that can be invested in their waste networks, sets performance targets, and sets the profits that the companies are allowed to make and return to their investors. Upgrading the national sewer systems is a possibility, and Ofwat could increase the amount that the water companies are allowed to spend on upgrading sewers and treatment works to fix the issue. This is such an eye-wateringly large amount that no government has approved it. There's a load of other work that can be done to reduce the amount of water that flows into sewers by, for example, not tarmaccing over every bit of green space in the country, and allowing water to soak into the ground. This requires private enterprise (outside of the water industry, even) to invest in something that doesn't make profit, however.
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Oct 27, 2021 21:44
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 18:32 |
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Doccykins posted:If you are with Bulb for your energy (like me) make sure you have a copy of your latest statement downloaded so when the website goes offline you have proof of the amount of credit in your account when Ofgem transfers you over to the supplier of last resort. If you haven't already started transferring off don't try now as there's a chance your Bulb account closure refund doesn't get processed Bulb are too large to go into Supplier of Last Resort - anyone taking on their customers needs to have a spare billion pounds knocking around that they can use to buy gas and power right now for delivery over the next five months. Instead, they'd go into special administration, which is a process that I don't think anyone in the industry fully understands. When the credit balances are protected, those costs will eventually find their way back into consumers' bills. Everyone should expect to pay somewhere in the region of £30-£50 a year extra starting in April to cover the cost of picking up the pieces based on the supplier failures so far this winter.
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Oct 30, 2021 01:03
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Mega Comrade posted:They were 3x4 times as expensive. If gas prices keep rising and the tories remove the energy cap, that difference might get much smaller. That’s unlikely to happen while gas fired generators that are maybe 50% efficient are our marginal generators - electricity is always going to be twice as expensive as gas on a p/kWh basis, purely because you need to buy 2 MWh of gas to generate 1 MWh of electricity.
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Oct 30, 2021 11:21
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NotJustANumber99 posted:I'm not sure I follow this. I'll try again, then. Electricity in the UK is generated from a number of different methods, but the marginal generator is generally gas-fired power stations. In this context, by marginal I mean the one that's making the least profit per kWh generated, so is the first one to turn off as the power price falls. If there's not enough electricity generation to meet demand, National Grid instruct more generators to generate, and that comes at a higher cost than buying power on the wholesale markets. This drives power prices to be at or above the cost of the marginal generator needed to meet demand. Combined Cycle Gas power stations - that is, where you have both a gas turbine generating power, and use the waste heat from that to produce steam and drive a steam turbine to also generate power - are somewhere between 49% and 52% efficient. The industry standard that we use for calculating profitability is 49.13%, mostly because that leads to some really easy conversions when buying gas and selling power. Ignoring the charges incurred by emitting carbon for a second, if a 50% efficient gas power station is deciding whether to run, it needs to buy 2 kWh of gas for every kWh of power it produces. This means that it only makes a profit by generating if the power price is twice the gas price. The additional costs of generation - such as carbon - then come into the mix. The cost of emitting carbon is based on a government tax of £18/tonne, plus one carbon emission certificate. These are selling for about £55/tonne. The overall point of this? With a few exceptions (warm, windy, sunny days where we don't need gas power stations online to meet demand for power), there's a hard floor for wholesale power prices at around 3 times the gas price. If energy retailers were allowed to charge at cost with the abolition of the price cap, you'd still see retail electricity prices at 3 or more times retail gas prices.
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Oct 31, 2021 14:52
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Endjinneer posted:Thanks for the effortpost. It sounds like this is vulnerable to a bit of enroning? If I own a wind farm that breaks even at 10p/kWh and an idle gas turbine that would break even at 30p, what's to stop me taking a bit of windfarm capacity offline "for maintenance" until the grid instructs me to switch the gas turbine on and raises wholesale prices to pay for it? It'd probably be better value to take the gas turbine out of service "for maintenance". The reduction in capacity should have the same effect on market prices, and you don't lose the 20p/kWh from replacing your wind generation with gas generation. However, there's a suite of European regulations called "REMIT" (Regulation of Energy Market Integrity and Transparency) which came in about 8 years ago, which defines this behaviour as market abuse. These regulations got transposed into UK law when Brexit happened, so they're still in effect. Breach of REMIT incurs both criminal and civil sanctions, so there's a reasonable chance you'd find yourself on the wrong side of Ofgem investigations and fines for doing that. Ofgem does have teeth in this area - InterGen had to pay out about £37m a couple of years ago following an Ofgem investigation into their market activity over four days in 2016. National Grid historically operated a bunch of reserve contracts to keep otherwise uneconomic plant which would have closed open for use in emergencies. It turned out to be pretty expensive compared to the standard balancing markets.
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Oct 31, 2021 17:41
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Guavanaut posted:US legislature is leaking again. Yeah, that one is all on the European Commission.
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Oct 31, 2021 18:07
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