alt Hacker NewsLabour and the Conservatives are no different from each other. The Tories back then expected the "free market" to take care of everything. And that "free market" has clearly failed British people given where we are. They were "extremely aggressive" in their words (like BoJo back in 2020) but really extremely passive in their actions. Britain really needs grid-scale energy storage to make renewables work and that is its own big challenge.
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Come on bro...next election, it will be different this time.
Tories do not back the free market. You said it yourself, the two parties are the same. Elections are irrelevant, both political parties pander towards orthogonal groups of voters, they tell them they are different, and they get in government and will do the same thing. Reform will do the same thing.
Also, the characterisation of what the government is able to do is extremely inconsistent. Able to lock down the whole country by fiat? Happened in an afternoon. Able to approve a 2-bed house twenty miles away from anyone? Sorry mate, need 26 forms, planning authority, need solar panels, need heat pump, etc. One of the big issues the UK has is with the understanding of government, it is the most bizarre mix of extreme libertarianism and extreme authoritarianism. It is a country where police will arrest someone from criticising a politician or the police AND a country where the police are unable to investigate almost all crimes (fraud investigations are outsourced to banks and private companies but there is action at multiple layers of government to control what happens on Twitter).
Storage is not possible. Everyone knows this. What game is being played here? Which other medium-sized country has large amounts of renewables with as much storage as we require. Electricity prices are already ruinously expensive. The solution is simple: do the stuff that works, that is it. The UK is a tale in being unable to do simple things that work.
> grid-scale energy storage
This is currently called natural gas. You store it in the ground, and in "day tanks" on land connected to pipes.
Nuclear can also be seen in the same way in relation to renewables.
Batteries are currently much further than I ever thought possible, but still nowhere close to being cost effective enough for most areas.
If you forced every solar or wind installation to have at least 48 hours of nameplate capacity in storage, you would get closer to the true cost of deploying renewables. Right now there is a whole lot of cherry picking going on, where investors are taking the profitable easy stuff, collecting subsidies, and then making the hard expensive stuff someone else's problem.
Right now battery deployments cover the few hour duck curve at best, because that's the only profitable way to deploy them. Hopefully the trend continues though!