Discussion > What happens if energy prices come down?
How to bet against success and lock in failure. And of course lock in guaranteed profits for the businesses who will in the process be ruining Britain. One really couldn't produce a energy policy disaster movie better than that. As Nigel Lawson said in the Lords, it makes the days of nationalisation under Labour look positively enlightened.
Richard Drake
Magic solutions like Thorium and the rest...need magic evidence before you can believe them ..there's always someone out to push up a stock price.
..Seeing it properly in action would be one thing.
.. If private companies want to chase innovation the profit and LOSS is theirs, there is no use messing about with subsides
.. However there is a reasonable chance of fusion reactions being sustainable within 10-20 years now
That Silura story was reported in 2010 ..slow going ?
stewgreen
Thorium is real and not magic, the US had a Thorium Reactor running for over a decade. Read "Merchants of Despair" by Robert Zubrin. The human race will be long gone before energy sources run out.
To be perfectly honest fusion scares the hell out of me ^.^
As Richard implies; almost any energy policy you could imagine would be better than the mess we are in right now.
Dung
Keith Macdonald
I just made the point in another discussion that the price of gas will go through the floor if we continue with our current policy. Cameron is repeating the US experience by drilling everywhere for shale even though we have no internal market and very little export potential.
No internal market because renewable energy has priority in electricity generation, thus ruling out new gas fired plants.
Little export potential because currently available pipelines do not connect to the high demand areas such as India and China. Oh yes and just like the USA we have no ability to export LNG.
Dung
Dung; our internal market is going to change over the next few years. All but one of the nukes will close down and, as I understand it, much of the coal capacity as well. That will leave gas as the only viable means of plugging the gap so we can expect to see plants taken out of mothballs and maybe some new ones built.
If our prices do drop exports to Europe through the two interconnectors will become viable although I am not sure of their capacity. In extremis we could follow the US and convert our LNG import terminals into exporters.
mikeh
mikeh
It takes 5 years from taking the decision to actually seeing an LNG export terminal come on stream, that is the point.
I think your assessment of our internal market is reasonable but we do not have reasonable people making the decisions.
Dung
Dung
As I keep saying, every time somebody whinges about what the government is doing and how nobody pays attention to the ordinary punter any more, it us up to we the people to make the decision makers into reasonable people or get up off our backsides and elect reasonable people.
On the well-established principle that "for evil to triumph it is necessary only for good men to do nothing" for eco-activists, troughers, rent-seekers, and other assorted people with subsidies to be farmed and axes to grind to get their way it only needs the rest of us to sit around wringing our hands and doing sod all to stop them.
Though I do wonder whether western civilisation has gone so far down the route of lapping up the bread and circuses or the televisual equivalent of soma (see Brave New World if by chance you don't get the reference) that we have passed a tipping point — a genuine one as opposed to the mythical ones the climate scaremongers try to frighten us with.
Mike Jackson
Keith, I think the linked article is more related to petrochemicals than energy costs per se, but is an interesting one. As a student in the 1990s, I heard the controlled functionalisation of methane described as the biggest unsolved problem in chemistry (in terms of potential economic and industrial significance). Their latest press releases indicate development is still taking place. I wish them luck.
michaelhart
In my inbox today, some advertising for "heating oil prices at a 20 month low". That came as a pleasant surprise for me (lviing out in the sticks, off the gas-grid).
How has this happened? Is it oil displaced from the US market by shale gas prices being lower?
Oftec says something similar.
http://www.oftec.co.uk/news_and_press_releases/oil-is-the-only-heating-fuel-where-prices-have-fallen
They say:
The latest quarterly data from the Sutherland Tables, the recognised independent source of comparative UK domestic heating costs, has revealed that oil is the only primary heating fuel that has come down in price over the past three years.
The current annual cost of using oil to heat a three bedroom home in Great Britain is now 5% lower than the average cost reported over the last three years, whereas the same average figures for homes using gas and electricity show an increase in heating costs of 14% and 16.5% respectively.
The price difference between gas (by far the most widely used fuel) and oil (used an estimated one million off-grid households) has narrowed significantly. Three years ago oil was nearly 60% more expensive than mains gas but now it is just over 12% more expensive, based on using a condensing boiler.
LPG, used by some 170,000 off-grid households, remains the most expensive fuel, costing a three bedroom home with a condensing boiler £1,923 per annum compared to oil at £1,275 and gas at £1,136.
Directly comparing the price of heating a three bedroom home in January 2011 to January 2014 provides an even starker result and shows that electricity has seen the greatest price increase over the last three years at 38.89%. Similarly, gas prices have increased by 37.3% and solid fuels by 26.1% respectively, whereas in comparison, the price of oil has decreased by 2.18%.
The substantial increase in electricity prices is especially notable as it means that renewable technologies such as air source (ASHP) and ground source (GSHP) heat pumps which run on electricity are becoming a much more expensive option to heat a typical home in Britain.
Keith Macdonald
In my inbox today, some advertising for "heating oil prices at a 20 month low". That came as a pleasant surprise for me (lviing out in the sticks, off the gas-grid).
How has this happened? Is it oil displaced from the US market by shale gas prices being lower?
Oftec says something similar.
http://www.oftec.co.uk/news_and_press_releases/oil-is-the-only-heating-fuel-where-prices-have-fallen
They say:
The latest quarterly data from the Sutherland Tables, the recognised independent source of comparative UK domestic heating costs, has revealed that oil is the only primary heating fuel that has come down in price over the past three years.
The current annual cost of using oil to heat a three bedroom home in Great Britain is now 5% lower than the average cost reported over the last three years, whereas the same average figures for homes using gas and electricity show an increase in heating costs of 14% and 16.5% respectively.
The price difference between gas (by far the most widely used fuel) and oil (used an estimated one million off-grid households) has narrowed significantly. Three years ago oil was nearly 60% more expensive than mains gas but now it is just over 12% more expensive, based on using a condensing boiler.
LPG, used by some 170,000 off-grid households, remains the most expensive fuel, costing a three bedroom home with a condensing boiler £1,923 per annum compared to oil at £1,275 and gas at £1,136.
Directly comparing the price of heating a three bedroom home in January 2011 to January 2014 provides an even starker result and shows that electricity has seen the greatest price increase over the last three years at 38.89%. Similarly, gas prices have increased by 37.3% and solid fuels by 26.1% respectively, whereas in comparison, the price of oil has decreased by 2.18%.
The substantial increase in electricity prices is especially notable as it means that renewable technologies such as air source (ASHP) and ground source (GSHP) heat pumps which run on electricity are becoming a much more expensive option to heat a typical home in Britain.
Keith Macdonald
Sorry, for the double-posting. I''m getting prompted to re-confirm the anti-spam details even though it has posted already. But that's not apparrent while I'm being prompted the second time. I don't know what to do about that.
Keith Macdonald
On the well-established principle that "for evil to triumph it is necessary only for good men to do nothing" for eco-activists, troughers, rent-seekers, and other assorted people with subsidies to be farmed and axes to grind to get their way it only needs the rest of us to sit around wringing our hands and doing sod all to stop them.
Corporations are not freedom. Corporations are enslavement. Before corporations and after royalty we had some freedom. After corporations took over money creation and power supply. We became slaves. To think that now those same corporations are going to free us is pure fantasy. Corporatism is fascism, not nazism as most people assume. And it is slavery. That's fact. For evil to triumph it is necessary only for good people to allow corporations to dictate our legislation.
replicant
"On the well-established principle"
And it certainly isn't a principle. It is an opinion.
replicant
As we well know, the price fixed for the new nuclear power station is based on the "expert guestimate" that wholesale prices in the UK will double by the time the station is turned on.
But what happens if they don't double?
Say because of some industry-changing technology breakthrough that nobody expected.
How about this one for example?
Almost all existing technology that converts oil into something else needs high temperatures and/or pressures. Therefore it is relatively expensive.
But a firm called Silura has almost accidently invented a catalyst that works at low temperature (cheap) to combine cheap natural gas with oxygen (cheap) to produce ethylene, the world’s largest commodity chemical.
More here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/523146/chasing-the-dream-of-half-price-gasoline-from-natural-gas/