Future of the UK electricity "market"

But that means maintaining a lot of expensive stuff on standby, specifically, gas-fired electricity generating capacity AND the entire infrastructure, physical and commercial, to ensure gas will be available when needed.  That’s easy enough** when (a) it all exists anyway; and (b) there’s strong reason to believe that residential gas demand will continue for a long time at roughly the present level, even as UK industry slowly transitions towards electrification, hydrogen, or an early grave, a.k.a. further offshoring.   Keeping stuff hanging around mostly idle doesn’t cost nothing.  Just like paying windfarms to stop generating; bringing ever more sophisticated batteries into the fleet; building vast new infrastructure to accommodate new windfarms; etc etc.  

But what of negative (wholesale) prices, increasingly a feature of most electricity markets?  Easy.  They are negative for just a few hours, just as they go wildly high for just a few hours (or longer …).  It’s volatility, that’s all – and tells you nothing about the average price which, as I’ve asserted, will rise and rise.  And what do we know about volatility?  It’s like a heartbeat: too low and it signifies death – but too high, and it’s a Very Bad (and costly) Thing.  Or (to switch useful analogies) like friction:  too low, and you’ll slide all over the place.  Too high, and you’re seriously (and expensively) inconvenienced.

We hear endless chatter, mostly from the EU (though Will Hutton is egregiously stupid misinformed on this also) where ignorance about markets is a dominant strand in public life, about “decoupling” the price of electricity from the price of gas.  What do they mean?  Well, initially they “meant” nothing more than “we’ve heard renewable electricity is cheap, nay free – so why has the retail price gone up?” – an expression of pure ignorance.  More recently, they’ve been gently steered towards something meaningful, indeed, logical – i.e. thinking about a more widespread deployment of longer-term financial hedging against electricity price volatility.  There’s nothing remotely new about this: any party that feels uncomfortable being exposed to price fluctuations should go for a fixed price!  If this is to be achieved via extending the market for ‘renewable PPAs’, i.e. fixed priced electricity sales contracts (or more likely CfDs) offered by renewables developers – compulsorily?? brokered by regulators?? – then so be it.  I’m not sure many industrial companies will enjoy the fixed prices on offer: that’s another matter entirely.

But it does bring us back rather neatly to point 2 above.  Whether it’s the average of volatile wholesale prices, or fixed-price PPAs, the price of electricity will carry on rising – long after Putin has been put back in his box.  That’s what happens when you move to an intrinsically more complex and basically entirely new way of running an entire, very large, industry.  All at once++.  Across a very large part of the world economy.

Doesn’t mean it can’t be done.  Does mean it’s gonna be expensive.

ND    

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** It‘ll be a lot more difficult without a base level of residential gas demand  

++ People who pretend otherwise  – and there are many – are like those who said Brexit would boost the UK economy.  I write as someone who voted for Brexit.  But I never thought it would be anything other than costly.