Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to Ten Minute Climate, the podcastbrought to you by Beaverbrook Energy.
Join Max I am Max and Tony.
Hi, I'm Tony, who between themhave got over 70 years of experience
in the energy industryand they're here to share it with you.
It's everything you need to knowdelivered in just ten minutes.
So let's get started.
why does electricity cost so much money?
(00:21):
Yeah, well, there are a few reasonswhich we can go to.
I think the first thing
that everyone's got to understandis it's kind of what you're blessed with.
Okay.
Where you are. We talked about Icelandin the previous episode.
They have very cheap power,natural resources.
Yeah. Natural resources. Yeah. Geothermal.
They have in Iceland.
It makes it very cheap in America.They've got a lot of cheap gas.
It makes it very cheap there.
(00:41):
Germany has not much.
It's got some cheap coal,but it depends on rubbish.
Coal in,
France, has a legacy of building
a lot of nuclear plants back in the day,and they're now sweating those assets.
At the moment
they need to build a new fleet,but it means that they've got cheap power.
Spain in the middle of the day.
It's got a lot of sun.So they have cheap power.
(01:03):
So it starts with where you areand what natural resources you've got.
But there must be some other elements,like does politics come into play?
Because the physics is easy.
If you've got a normal conventional powerstation, you burn stuff.
It's about 30% efficient.
Whatever you chuck in at one end,you get 30% out.
The other end is electricity.
(01:24):
That's the rules of physicsapply everywhere.
So what's different between each country?
Well, is when you get politics, it'spolitics.
It's political decisions.
They make a difference anyway.
Everything is politics,but particularly in energy, as you know.
So, you know,if you build a lot of cheap onshore wind,
you have cheap renewable power,which we did for a long time.
(01:44):
And that is the lowest costrenewable power.
It's still cheaper than solar.
But then we stopped it.
So we built a huge political decision.
It was, but we then went offshore wind,which is much more expensive.
Nuclear.
How fast can you build it?
We havewe have an incredibly sort of ossified,
slow, expensive systemfor building nuclear.
(02:06):
So it takes usbest part of 30 years from going,
oh, I feel like a nuclear power stationto actually having one.
Do you feel like a nuclear power station?
I feel like I like few, but, you know,I just don't have the time.
Yeah, but then other in other countries,they decide to do it faster.
You know, in China they've got 26 reactorsunder construction at the moment.
And they're getting on withit with their own homegrown,
(02:29):
designs that are all standardizedand very fast.
We talk about small modular reactorswhere they've got large modular reactors.
They're all the same,and they're pumping them out.
Or in Abu Dhabi they said, you know,
give me some nuclear.
And it was about, I think, soup to nuts.
Ten years in reality,people say it was six years.
It wasn't really.
But they had,you know, no issues in planning.
(02:53):
They just said they wanted itand they got the Koreans
in who are brilliant and built itvery, very, very fast.
So you've got those political decisionsas well.
It then goes on to market structure.
So that's a complicated one.
It's how you set the price so wellhow people buy and sell what the rules.
So things like that what the rules are.
(03:13):
So the easiest way is in,in a lot of in parts of America,
what they do is basicallythey take all of the costs
of electricity in a yearin a state, right?
The costs of, of the power station, the,the amortization,
how much, how much of that of of the builda building it running it.
Yeah. But but you had it. You yeah.
You it's the costs the power stations.
(03:34):
It's the cost of running themin that year.
And it's the cost of fueland it's cost the grid.
And they divide itessentially by everybody.
And you get the price. It'sthat's a simplification.
But it's broadly how it works.We don't have that in the UK.
So we have a wholesale marketand we have something
that's a it's a it'san economist's wet dream.
Right.
So what happens isthere's a clearing price of the last
(03:57):
there with me listeners on this.
It's the last megawatthour sets the clearing price.
So the idea is that,there's an auction, jump in.
But I'm getting this completely wrong.
But there's a, there's basicallyan auction and every half hour
for the power on the system,and it goes to GPT cheaper until you,
until you get the last one you need.
(04:18):
And that's the last onethat gets the highest price
because it's been in the highest pricebracket more or less. Right?
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah.
Now the economy becomes more scarceor more vital.
The price goes up. Yes.
When they used to have what they calleda spot market,
it actually used to be worth doingsomething called peak lopping,
which was actually starting generatorsto avoid importing expensive electricity.
(04:40):
So yeah, buying and paying for generatorsyourself rather than take off the grid.
That's what happenswhen you get variation in price.
Yeah, but the idea of thisthis is is a good one
because what it doesis it incentivizes two things.
One, cheap generation,
because the cheaper you are,the more profit you make, right?
And secondly,it stops scarcity because everyone knows
(05:03):
that's the lastbit of power gets a high price.
So you build out a bigger grid.
That means that you reach the peaksand you're encouraging cheaper.
So the economists get very excited.
Like this is this is beautiful.
But what they, what they thenrealized or what not what they realized.
But what happened is with the build outof renewables and and zero marginal price
(05:24):
generation is that it was it
dumps money on peopleon, on, on on cheap generators.
Way too much.
So right nowif you're, you're generating solar,
or if you're lucky to be generating solarin a period where there isn't that much
solar in the price as high,you can get paid 100 pounds a megawatt
hour for something, it's costingyou virtually nothing at all.
(05:44):
And this happened a lot in the aftermathof the Ukraine war, because gas prices
very high.
So the last bit of generation coming onthe system to meet that demand was gas.
They needed a very high pricegoing into the hundreds of pounds,
sometimes thousands,
in order to keep the system stable.
But that set the price for everybody else.
So the guys, the cheapgenerators were sitting there like boys.
(06:07):
I was only expecting £50 a megawatt.
Now that's all I need.
But I'm getting sometimes up to 3000.
The problem is everybody pays for that.
So that system right nowis is no longer fit for purpose.
So the two ways you deal with thisyou can split the market between
renewables and nonrenewablebecause they're very different.
And you can do zonal pricing.
(06:27):
So you're splitting between winterand summer ready because like renewables
will be really cheap in the summerbecause you've got the added solar
in the winter, you'rebasically left with wind and not solar.
So the price will go up relatively. Yeah.
But it's always been differentwhen to the summer.
I mean, people don't see thatin your electricity bills,
but the wholesale markets definitely.Yeah. It's kind of a coal fired.
(06:48):
Power stations are the same all the time.
Yeah.
But but but you've always had cheaper,
cheaper power in the summerbecause there's less demand.
Yeah it's been more expensive the winter.
But that is getting more extreme.
But what, what what what the government'sdone is done contracts of difference.
Basically given a flat priceto renewables, it's not a perfect system,
but it
it kind of gets them out of that wholesalemarket and says
(07:09):
this is the price you need to build it.
It's fair.
You're getting a return on yours.
So they just want to control variationsin the price but taking some risk out.
Yeah.And they take it out of the market. Yeah.
The other thing that's a big debate atthe moment is zonal pricing.
So you have different prices dependingwhere you are generating electricity.
Right.
But surely it should be based on wherethe consumer is rather than where the.
(07:32):
Well, if you've got Scotland that,that they're producing,
they've got loads of electricity.
North Scotland when the wind blowswhich is not really useful.
We're using all in southern England. Yeah.
I mean there's, there's
a lot of political controversyat the moment about turning off
wind farms, you know, inverted commas,paying people to turn off wind farms.
And it's an inefficient use of the system.
(07:56):
But the
argument is that it's cheaper to do thatthan to build out a massive grid
that uses every last bit of, of,of generation and the other zone up zone.
The zonal argument is bill generationclose to where people are using it.
So you need less long distancegrid to power your.
But then surely it would make senseto start
(08:17):
moving all the steel industryto northern Scotland.
Yeah, well it would from a power
point power price point of view,but it's just not going to happen.
I mean, that's the zonal pricing.
People say, yeah, we'll move industryto Scotland because power will be cheap.
I don't know.
Well over a, over the long termperiod of, of,
of the existence of anything,the capital cost of building an energy
(08:40):
intensive process is minuscule comparedto the cost of running the process.
If you, rather than doing the accountancything like you can think
three quarters of the year aheadif you're really brave,
but normally you'd like to focus ona quarter of the year.
If you actually think about the lifetimeof what you're building,
(09:00):
the savings of taking your processto the energy are huge.
Absolutely huge.
When it goes back to our point about,
you know,
your physical inheritanceof the natural resources you've got
But let's, You know, I think it's worthtalking about electricity bills.
But they're made up.
Made up ofbecause people think that it's all energy.
(09:21):
It's not.
Yeah. And and the,
I mean, I hold my hand up guilty here.
I used to be
in a relatively senior positionin one of the big six energy companies,
and they are basically a passthrough business.
I mean, we had an all our organization
build three and a half, 3.75
billion pounds worth of energy a year,
(09:44):
but we only actually 5% of that
that passed across the deskwas ours to play with to 5% of profit.
That's all right.
No, no, I've seen 3 billion profit, profitper cent to run the business.
So we would make a 20% profitmargin on 5%.
So basically we're making 1%.
So out of your 100 pound
(10:05):
energy billyour energy company gets a pound.
So you're not profit, you're not evil.
The energy companies aren't even know thethe thing about energy bills
is they're made up of so much morethan your energy politically.
In the UK we made the decision to makeelectricity attacks point right.
So you pay all sorts of other charges.
But it's about I mean, let's break itdown.
(10:26):
It's about it'sroughly half is the actual energy.
Yeah.
The generationthe energy paying for the power stations.
Yeah. All of that sort of malarkey.
About a quarter is the gridmaybe not quite, but all right.
That's. Yeah.Getting the energy around the system.
That's genuinely expensive.Yeah. Delivering it basically. Yeah.
And about a quarter is taxes and chargesfor green power.
(10:49):
Yes. the thing isthe government could make a decision
to change the tax point over to gas.
But because we use roughly 3 or 4 timesas much gas, especially in
domestic environment, than electricityin terms of their actual kilowatt hours,
that would impact people very,very detrimentally.
(11:10):
Because if you startedputting it on a kilowatt hour of gas,
when you think that, you know,what I'm saying is every every time
you use 100kW in your house, on averageduring the year, 25kW
are spent on what you seecooking your food, putting your lights
on, running your TV, charging the kidsphones, all of that sort of stuff.
Three quarters of it is fundamentallykeeping you warm out of the gas.
(11:35):
It's something like 1% of gasis spent on cooking.
Yeah, 10 to 15% is spent on hot waterand all the rest is space heating.
Yeah.
And that that there's a there'sa problem there because that's my opinion.
Too many taxes on electricity,not enough on gas.
And that that means that, you know,when you want people to move
to electric heating, to heat pumps.
Yeah, it actuallythe economics are not quite the same
(11:56):
because your electricity is, isis relatively
a heck of a lot more expensivethan, than the gas.
And it means the heatpump doesn't make as much sense.
If you even if you evened out the taxationyou pumps would be
would be a much better investmentin the UK. Exactly.
But I'll tell you what would suddenlybecome very popular is insulation.
We have a rubbish housing stockright at the housing
(12:18):
stock is splitin about three pieces in the UK.
There's the sort of pre-war
type propertiesand I mean like know the stuff
that's nearly 100 years old, like cheese,which is Nick.
Yeah.
Which is about one third of the stockwhich is built before
building regulations.
Some of it hasn't got foundationsor insulation or anything.
(12:41):
And in that is like Windsor Castle,another such things show.
Then there's the bit in the middle,which is basically the Second World War
till about 1917, 1975,
when you got all the housesbuilt with huge great glass windows,
like 1960s stuffwith little windows in the
I've got metal frames andthey used to leak heat all over the place
(13:02):
because energy was so cheap.
Now that was the era of coal fires.
And then you've got the post 1970s stufffrom the sort of the
the most recent oil crises.
That's when they
started to bring building regulationsin about insulation and whatever.
So only basically a third of our housingstock
is even remotely connectedto the real world as it exists now.
(13:25):
And all the rest throws heat outlike it's going out of fashion.
And the various governments have havethey've tried they've tried
to put insulation on your energy billand it's never really worked.
It's really hard to do.
So to summarize, you know, in the UK,the reason electricity costs
so much is we're not blessedwith the most amazing natural resources.
We've made some some pretty dodgy
political decisions from time to time,like not having any sample wind.
(13:48):
And we've got a really complexmarket structure that means we're, we're
we've got a price set by gas
that probably means we're paying too muchfor a lot of our electricity
most of the time.
But some of that is fixablepolitically and socially.
Something's fixable politically.
(14:08):
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(14:30):
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