March 17, 2023 5:28 AM PDT
The retail cost of electricity has very little to do with physics and a great deal to do with profits, taxes and subsidies.
There are not really any solar subsidies anymore in the UK. They pay you what is basically cost (or more accurately, they pay the electricity supplier, most of them just pocket this, but Bulb gives you the money.)
Having lived through many, I understand a good deal about UK summers. Yes, the sun is above the horizon for over 16 hours in June, but the solar angle never exceeds 62 degrees in London, 59 in Inverness, which is why it is generally colder in Scotland than in England and the north pole (24 hour sunlight) stays frozen.
Gee, if only someone could work out a magic way to deal with that issue, such as tilting the panels at ~30 degrees. But apparently you can't think of any way. Must be impossible.
And we do have a lot of cloud over these Atlantic islands.
Yeah, except not so much in summer. Solar is quite predictable in summer, and isn't permanently hidden by clouds in the UK.
The value of mains electricity and gas is 24/7/365 availability at any level from zero to the supply rating. Until the cost of renewables includes that of maintaining an adequate overnight and strategic (say 10 day) reserve, you are not comparing apples with apples.
Wrong. Dispatchable electricity is certainly useful to have, but you want to use it as little as possible because: it's always £££ and high CO2 emissions. But a lot of our electricity is predictable and highly correlated with the daytime.
