> The government argues that wind projects are cheaper than new gas power stations and will "bring down bills for good", but the Conservatives have accused its climate targets of raising energy costs.
Those for it say it is cheaper electricity, those against it say it is more expensive electricity. The cult members of each side say these are indisputable facts.
All I know is that when the wind blows and the sun shines my electricity costs £0.00 (or less) - I expect this comes at some kind of cost however.
The issue is that quite often the wind doesn’t blow - often for several weeks like last january - and the sun barely shines for much of the year. So renewables mean the country just has to pay for (and subsidise) a whole ton of extra infra but can’t actually retire non-renewable infra because you can’t rely on renewables. This strategy is why UK electricity is so absurdly expensive.
And when presented with this politicians and “green” sorts will handwave about pumped storage or whatever despite that basic back of the envelope calculations will show we can’t build enough of that to store 4 weeks worth of electricity for a whole country.
Assuming you're talking about Agile Octopus / Time of use tariffs, if you look at the price distribution for December: https://agileprices.co.uk/?fromdate=20251231 , negative prices are very rare compared to expensive prices.
Yes, negative is rare, but I wouldn't say that it's overwhelmingly expensive.
The median range is 15p-20p (60% of the time in December) and the UK "price cap" is about 26.35p.
With a tariff like that, shifting usage outside of 4pm-7pm can lead to massive savings. With our usage from the Octopus API, I can see from OctopusCompare that in the past month my effective average unit cost would be 19.24p/kWh, and we don't do any specific load shifting.
Climate targets - including the Conservative ones, which have had the majority impact on UK emissions reductions - have definitely increased energy prices. Wind projects being cheaper than gas power stations is a capex comparison, not a consumer price one.
The cult members will say whatever but you can measure cost. Wind is expensive, this project is expensive, and it won't lead to lower bills.
I am also not sure what you mean by "the Conservatives"...they started this about ten years ago. The issue was, something that was pointed out at the time, that they went into as a primarily political decision without any regard for the costs or trade-offs. The result has been much higher electricity prices. The position that Labour are taking is almost identical: anyone who disagrees with us a loon, pressers that are simultaneously obviously misleading and bombastic in the claims made (the presser for this has the head of a quango saying what a "stonking" job he is doing), and massive lobbyist intervention because of the need for subsidies (subsidies are now 4x the size of industry profits, almost all of the people quoted in the presser for this are lobbyists). Unfortunately, the reality of cult members is that they believe their cult is unique and special, and every other cult is wrong. This happened with the Tories ten years ago, it is happening with Labour now, in ten years it will be another party doing the same thing...it is how cults work.
They're... not rented, you realise? Once the thing is installed, dependence on the manufacturer is limited, particularly for solar. I think you're confused on the wind turbines, btw; most North Sea wind seems to use equipment made by Siemens, Vestas or GE.
The alternative, gas, involves far more literal foreign dependencies; the gas has to come from somewhere.
Those for it say it is cheaper electricity, those against it say it is more expensive electricity. The cult members of each side say these are indisputable facts.
All I know is that when the wind blows and the sun shines my electricity costs £0.00 (or less) - I expect this comes at some kind of cost however.