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I'm in the UK and am currently being paid to use electricity.

My energy provider uses a tracker tariff which can change every half hour (it does have a maximum cap to prevent the issues seen in Texas). Prices are currently negative, so every kWh I use right now means the electricity company pays me.

Nuclear promised energy which was "too cheap to meter". But solar actually delivered.

If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?

It seems silly, but actually... it's driving useful behavior I suppose. Then again, maybe a good government would notice this and just fast track grid storage rather than distribute that work to all the citizens.

Yes. I have a 4.8kWh battery which is slurping up electrons. It charges either from our solar panels or from cheap grid electricity.

It discharges when prices are high. So it'll mostly go into my oven tonight. If export prices are high, it can also sell back.

Very roughly, we sell about 16% of our stored electricity - the rest is used by our home.

See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/02/30-months-to-3mwh-some-more...

A lot of the value to homeowners is essentially arbitrage on the retail cost of electricity: when prices are high you're going to be paying a lot more to pull electricity from the grid than you would be paid to supply it, so you're better off using up the buffer yourself as opposed to paying for electricity from the grid.
> If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?

Yes, some people do this. There's even a startup built around the idea: https://www.axle.energy/

Sure you could. How much do you think they will pay you per kw? 1/10 what you paid them and they will charge you for using their infrastructure..at least in the US they do.
Someone at the utility went through the same math you are and decided it isn't worth it at scale. It's probably not worth it at small scale.
Overall on it's own that isn't yet profitable to do, unless you're e.g. a wind producer.
Yes, I believe some EVs allow this too.
Like an EV....
Batteries are getting affordable too - Fogstar do a 16kWh battery for around £2000. Plus, grid scale iron-air batteries sound promising.
Have you got one? Looking for installation options.
Europe seems to be responding well since the Ukraine war, the picture now is a lot more positive than in 2022. The UK has postionined itself well, even without the mass uptake of local generation/storage in it's domestic market.
I couldn't disagree more. I'm going to point to Gary Stevenson [1] for why. He could probably get to the point faster but here's the core premise: Europe responded to the energy shocks since 2020 by transferring the better part of a trillion euros to energy companies in the US and the Middle East, particularly for LNG.

Imagine where Europe might be if half a trillion euros was spent on renewables.

The core problem as he describes it is that European governments don't own these providers so it's a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the ultra-wealthy.

Back in the pandemic, Spain was one of the few countries that tackled the inflation shock in a better way with a windfall profits tax. Interestingly, Europe is talking about doing that now [2]. That would be smarter.

Energy prices disproportionately hurt the poor [3]. If the government owned or part-owned the energy (like Norway does) then you could offset that without burning cash to stick your head in the sand for a little bit longer.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi265I48MdI

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/04/europe-energy-windfall-profi...

[3]: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2023/rising-household...

The UK had/has the exact same windfall tax on energy:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-gener... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-profits-le...

And the reason Spain is so well insulated is because they have limited gas interconnection so they have a 'captive supplier' in Algerian gas. Algerian gas can basically only go to Spain, Morocco or the domestic Algerian market. They have some limited LNG export capacity (which is growing and will significantly change the price Spain pays longer term).

Useful background on Mr. Stevenson

https://www.ft.com/content/7e8b47b3-7931-4354-9e8a-47d75d057...

Electricity prices in the UK are painful, and galling when set by the price of gas, but it’s worth remembering that this model and all this expense has bought a major asset that will only become more important and strategic.

The next milestones to hit are:

* A 10x increase in generation capacity

* A 100x increase in storage capacity

* A 1000x increase in seasonal storage capacity

* Electrification of heating

* Electrification of synfuels and synthetic chemical feedstocks

Full energy sovereignty is achievable within 10 years at wartime-spending levels. Probably 30 years otherwise.

Rehabilitation of nuclear is almost certainly required for the transition and a very good hedge / backstop regardless.

Yeah, we're (UK) only just at the "occasionally cheap 100% renewables" state, and it's maddeningly slow progress. But it seems like a lot of things are suddenly coming online, like battery storage, and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years. https://eandt.theiet.org/2026/04/02/ps12bn-plan-upgrade-scot...
> Rehabilitation of nuclear is almost certainly required for the transition

Using nuclear means electricity prices will be set by the price of nuclear - which is even higher than the price of gas.

Besides, it is economically impossible to operate it as backstop as almost all of its costs are in paying back the construction loan: run it 10% of the time and its cost-per-kWh is increased by 10x, run it 1% of the time and its cost-per-kWh is increased by 100x. With that kind of budget there are suddenly a lot of alternatives to nuclear as generation-of-last-resort.

How do you make money with a nuclear power plant when renewables deliver more than enough power 95% of the year?
Electricity prices in the UK are painful, and galling when set by the price of gas

It's painful indeed. Today, I watched the price go negative as wind and solar reduced the gas contribution to about 3% of the mix. As that gas mix rose to 5%, the price turned around and became painfully expensive again.

The UK has positioned itself almost uniquely poorly in Europe. That is why its government bond prices are trading at a premium to the others.
When I was young they talked about a green revolution. Now with low solar panel costs, as well as batteries and inverters we really are living in a green revolution.
So everything should be cheaper right...RIGHT?
UK is legally required to set the price of electricity to whichever generator has the highest cost - which is natural gas. Its called marginal cost pricing.
This is amazing news. I look forward to my bills going up again next month!
I believe Centrica did some research before the Iran war and found that if we were able to get gas for free, energy bills wouldn't fall and would actually rise over the next few years (because of the mix towards structurally high cost supply).

It says something that the people running the monopoly cash machine are asking questions about bankrupting their customers/ability to pay but politicians are shutting their eyes and pounding onto the accelerator. What a world.

Why are people making (intentionally?) vague statements about prices going up?

Are you referring to the war Trump started, or are you all climate denying loons who love Trump and think net-zero is a Chinese hoax?

Or just nihilists that just think the world is going to shit in multiple ways and refuse to even contemplate small silver linings on dark clouds?

It's impossible to tell from these quips.

The issue though is that the UK spends something along the lines of £10-25bn (depending how you count subsidies) a year on renewable. Something like £10bn in direct subsidies via CfD and RO, then another ~£1.5-2bn on curtailment (paying wind farms to turn off), ~£3bn in balancing market costs, and £6bn on transmission upgrade costs (passed back to consumers/businesses) to upgrade transmission for nearly always renewable projects. There's actually a lot of others I think you could attribute to renewables but I could spend all day writing about this.

My guess is that £20bn/year is a fair cost overall in subsidy payments. This is clearly not offset by natural gas fuel savings even with elevated prices.

The UK IMO made a couple of critical mistakes. Firstly, far too much offshore wind is in Scotland when it should have been closer to population centres in England. A few factors for this but the issue is planning is devolved to Scotland (so they have every incentive to approve as many) but energy subsidies are set by Westminster. By the time UK central government realised this it was too late (or they didn't want to rock the cart for political reasons post/during Scottish independence referendum).

We're now having to pay £20-30bn+ to get Scottish wind generation down to England where it is needed (primarily through new 5 (!) 2GW HVDCs from Scotland to England). It would have been far far better just to... build those wind farms closer to England. This would have still required grid upgrades but far cheaper ones (bringing it 100-200km to population centres instead of all the way from Scotland, plus you still need to do the ones in England on top of that for the most part to get it from the HVDC landing sites to the population centres).

The second major issue is there is definitely massive diminishing returns from adding more renewables at this point. There's too many renewables on the grid a lot of the time, even if transmission was perfect - supply is outstripping demand. Instead of building more and more generation the subsidies should be redirected towards storage projects.

But overall, for the same £20bn a year you could have probably built 5 Hinckley Point C sized 3.2GW nuclear plants concurrently (assuming £4bn a year capex for 10 years). In 20 years you'd have probably 30GW of nuclear built, which should cover nearly all electricity demand in the UK in that time, with very limited transmission costs (existing nuclear plants have good grid connections and you build them close to them). And importantly, you would basically eliminate _any_ dependence on gas from the UK grid. Clearly nuclear has risks in project delivery, but at least it's reliable once built.

It's important to look at the whole picture though - most of the issues you raised are political issues, either brought about by NIMBYism or a lack of infrastructure investment over the past few decades. Without this investment (which, yes, is more expensive than it would be if it weren't also providing additional benefits tailored for renewables) the grid would continue to deteriorate. So clearly there is some amount of this cost that would need to be invested regardless.

There's also subsidies for fossil fuels to consider [0]. I don't hold these figures as gospel, but there's inarguably a massive amount of money going to propping up the (wildly profitable and hugely destructive) industry that's causing most of your raised issues in the first place - either through reduced maintenance and infrastructure investment (gotta get those shareholder returns) or lobbying/public influence campaigns.

To be clear - I absolutely agree with most of your complaints. I just see them as issues caused/exacerbated by entrenched political players, and I think the benefits to our society of getting off our fossil fuel addiction are worth the costs of modernizing our infrastructure for the long haul.

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/09/fossil-f...

> But overall, for the same £20bn a year you could have probably built 5 Hinckley Point C sized 3.2GW nuclear plants concurrently (assuming £4bn a year capex for 10 years).

Planning began for Hinkley Point C in 20113. It was approved in 2016. Construction commenced in 2017-2018. It's hit major delays and is currently projected to come online in 2030. It could be delayed furhter. Unit 2 is expected about a year later [1]. Cost have ballooned to almost £50 billion [2] and may balloon further.

So you're looking at almost 20 years to build, £50 billion in costs and electricity production of ~3.2GW.

AFAICT that 3.2GW is ~7% of the UK's current electricity requirements so I'm not sure where you're getting "nearly all electricity demand". Also, 5 Hinkley Point Cs would be 16GW of electricity not 30GW.

Hinkley Point C has a contracted price of £133/MWh. I imagine there's some risk-sharing and inflation in the contract so this will probably go up. Compare this to £65/MWh for new solar and £72/MWh for new onshore wind [3]. Plus of course that wind and solar projects don't take 20 years to come online.

Lastly, the only way the per MWh costs can even get that low is by giving Hinkley Point C a 60 year lifespan to amortize the cost over a sufficiently large timespan. It's likely that as the plant ages, operational costs will significantly increase beyond what's projected.

[1]: https://eandt.theiet.org/2026/02/23/hinkley-point-c-faces-fu...

[2]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/02/20/hinkley-poin...

[3]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-new-uk-onshore-wind-and-solar...

Isn't it better to build a decentralized grid out of standard parts than a few highly complex nuclear reactors? To me, that makes the system more resilient and easier to maintain. Nuclear seems like a worse choice long-term than wind/solar/batteries. Balcony solar could get us nuclear reactor levels of power per year once broadly legalized.
That's some pretty creative accounting to get to the 25bn mark. You also don't need to subsidise storage projects. They get built by market demand, as you can see by the amount being built and operated by energy trading firms who use them solely to buy power when the price is low and sell when high.

The planing issues were mostly due to the conservative party having a complete hate for onshore wind.

Nuclear fans are heavily underestimating the cost of that energy source. The levelized cost of energy per kWh today is TRIPLE that of solar already, at a negative learning curve, with a gap only widening (and accelerating so). For the very same cost per kWh, you can get double overprovisioned solar PLUS battery storage at 90% capacity factor, TODAY.

All of that fully decentralized, within the next years instead of decades, with distributed (not megacorp) ownership AND not having every other of these megaprojects cancelled due to protests.

And that figure doesn't even include externalized cost like national/environmental security or decommissioning costs.

Nuclear is riding a dead horse in 2026.

Why replace oil dependency with uranium dependency (presumably from Russia)? Costs are not the only consideration.
Surely gas prices would spike if the UK needed to import enough to generate an extra 125TWh. And whilst we are waiting for nuclear to come online you still need to generate energy.
> build those wind farms closer to England

How? The issue is local NIMBYs [0], anti-industry environmentalists [1], far left leaning groups [2], and even the fishing lobby [3] all attempt to obstruct wind farm expansion and make it difficult for moderates in Labour to actually execute on building energy independence for the UK.

Of course, this is also being amplified by information warfare by opponents to the UK [4][5], as can be seen by the social media campaign against offshore wind farms in the Isle of Man [6].

Frankly, the UK needs to internalize Fiona Hill's [7] position and start cracking down on fifth columnists like Farage, Corbyn, and their acolytes.

[0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3r39el1ne0o

[1] - https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/26000069.rejection-200m-...

[2] - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/labour-versu...

[3] - https://fishingnews.co.uk/news/developer-pulls-out-of-east-o...

[4] - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/18/uk-politics...

[5] - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/social-media/article/iran-war-fa...

[6] - https://www.facebook.com/61588338835208/

[7] - https://xcancel.com/FrankRGardner/status/2027098560647348410

We have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. The politicians obsess over net-zero at the expense of dealing with the issues affecting most people.
What if a happy byproduct of pushing for net zero is more investment in renewables, and decoupling the electricity price from gas?
You seem to make the same comments in every thread about renewable energy regardless of what's actually happening.
> We have some of the highest electricity prices in the world.

Current price −£24.86/MWh (yes you get paid to use it)

Honestly: jog on.

You can see the transition happening. Right now.

Does this cancel out the high energy prices people in the UK have been paying for the past decade+? Part of the reason the bills are high is because they subsidise the installation of renewable generation.
In hindsight it was quite prescient to be installing renewables wasn't it.
> Part of the reason bills are high is because they subsidise the installation of renewable generation.

Yeah citation definitely needed. UK electricity prices are high because we are highly dependent on imported gas.

Sounds like that was a good idea, then? Not sure why you perceive this as some sort of gotcha or an axe to grind.

Yes, building infrastructure costs money. Where's the problem?

Yes. Obviously it does.