alt Hacker News> The government argues that wind projects are cheaper than new gas power stations and will "bring down bills for good", but the Conservatives have accused its climate targets of raising energy costs.
Those for it say it is cheaper electricity, those against it say it is more expensive electricity. The cult members of each side say these are indisputable facts.
All I know is that when the wind blows and the sun shines my electricity costs £0.00 (or less) - I expect this comes at some kind of cost however.
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Assuming you're talking about Agile Octopus / Time of use tariffs, if you look at the price distribution for December: https://agileprices.co.uk/?fromdate=20251231 , negative prices are very rare compared to expensive prices.
Climate targets - including the Conservative ones, which have had the majority impact on UK emissions reductions - have definitely increased energy prices. Wind projects being cheaper than gas power stations is a capex comparison, not a consumer price one.
The cost is that you need storage or alternatives. Solar is more predictable - you can have very long periods of low wind.
The cult members will say whatever but you can measure cost. Wind is expensive, this project is expensive, and it won't lead to lower bills.
I am also not sure what you mean by "the Conservatives"...they started this about ten years ago. The issue was, something that was pointed out at the time, that they went into as a primarily political decision without any regard for the costs or trade-offs. The result has been much higher electricity prices. The position that Labour are taking is almost identical: anyone who disagrees with us a loon, pressers that are simultaneously obviously misleading and bombastic in the claims made (the presser for this has the head of a quango saying what a "stonking" job he is doing), and massive lobbyist intervention because of the need for subsidies (subsidies are now 4x the size of industry profits, almost all of the people quoted in the presser for this are lobbyists). Unfortunately, the reality of cult members is that they believe their cult is unique and special, and every other cult is wrong. This happened with the Tories ten years ago, it is happening with Labour now, in ten years it will be another party doing the same thing...it is how cults work.
> All I know is that when the wind blows and the sun shines my electricity costs £0.00 (or less)
£0.00 and complete submission to china which produces 75% of solar panels, windmills and batteries to store their production