Pretty excited for Ceredigion wind turbines to subsidise London and for Llŷn tidal to subside Liverpool and Manchester. Very cool very cool.
by trondheim-is-costal
Pretty excited for Ceredigion wind turbines to subsidise London and for Llŷn tidal to subside Liverpool and Manchester. Very cool very cool.
by trondheim-is-costal
29 comments
Strange how Wales is just merged with England for this banding.
WTF is south wales mixed in with London!!!!
We produce loads of clean energy here!
This is some pretty god awful planning ngl. Lets have West Wales one of the lowest income areas of the UK if not thee lowest pay the same tariff as london and a chunk the South East. Genius! Considering this is a Labour plan the lack of actual attention to Wealth redistribution is mind boggling.
The valleys and rural parts of west Wales would be priced in with London. I guess it depends if it works out cheaper or more costly Vs applying a middle split for GB6.
I assume it’s like this based on a map of locations that can be developed to produce energy, it would make a lot more sense if we were shown it along side this so we’re not left guessing why South wales is in the same “Area” as London.
There is an insane amount of offshore wind in operation and being built off the East coast of England, so it’s very unlikely.
If Scotland can be kept separate to England then surely Wales can too (as the whole country, not split). I think you’re right, they’re only splitting us like this to subsidise England, again. Wales produces more electricity than we use, with the surplus being sent to the grid (mostly for use in England).
Surely London and surrounds should be its own area?!
Why are we paying for London’s high consumption in the valleys?
If it’s anything like water it’s possibly the other way around. For water much more dispersed infrastructure means our cost of water is some of the highest in the UK.
A useful [map](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66a7d56eab418ab055592f34/Map_of_UK_wind_capacity_2023.pdf) for the uninformed.
The answer to your question is of course “no”.
You are speculating about something that hasn’t happened and that hasn’t even been proposed. It might be a better idea to wait and see what is actually going to be proposed before getting excited about how unfair it all is.
What’s is thermal? Like heat pumps or are we talking industrial scale drilling?
Carmarthen has little in common with Southend. Cofiwch dryweryn.
So, I also think this is silly, but I understand why they’ve done it this way. It makes a lot more sense when you put it side-by-side with the [UK National Grid Infrastructure Map ](https://www.nationalgrid.com/electricity-transmission/network-and-infrastructure/network-route-maps)(https://www.nationalgrid.com/electricity-transmission/network-and-infrastructure/network-route-maps) where you can see the boundaries follow the high voltage interconnects.
South Wales and North Wales won’t be a single unit, because they don’t have any interconnects between them without going through England.
This doesn’t appear to be the zones that are being directly proposed by government. Just the FTI analysis based on National grids 2022 scenarios?
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I guess that’s me going to have to shut my mouth about wanting to move to regional pricing. The crazy Gerrymandering to favour the big English cities in this is vomit inducing.
We’re subsidising your welfare bill so fairs fair.
R/Wales getting itself in a tizzy over nothing?!
Surely not
It’s not. There are loads of wind turbines off the shore of England in the GB6 region and onshore.
Oh FFS. We’re part of the UK and “England’s biggest cities” have no spaces for their own wind turbines obviously, so they have to go somewhere else and send electricity into those cities.
Some of you are acting like Wales is already an independent country. It isn’t, we’re part of the UK.
English taxpayers could equally respond with “pretty excited to be working and paying tax to fund wales every year”
Honestly. Nationalism has been a mental illness throughout human history and “left wing nationalism” is no different.
I don get it, electricity is electricity, its all on the same grid anyway. So what if electricity produced in Wales ends up in London? We still get the jobs maintaining all that infrastructure in Wales. Londoners are giving us their custom.
Cymru has an “extraction infrastructure” designed to take resources into England. So this is just the latest version of what’s always been.
No, London, Scotland and the Southeast subsidie the rest of the UK.
Places with lots of renewable energy inherently supply places with less renewable energy (and get paid for doing so). Expecting cities to be provided for by areas that aren’t cities makes logical sense, so I don’t agree with the implied premise of the headline – Wales has fewer cities and more tidal and wind energy per capita than England.
If you are more upset with the North/South Wales divide, that us because there are relatively few (if any?) High energy interconnects between North and South Wales due to the mountainous regions in Mid Wales; most of our energy infrastructure runs to the East and around the mountains.
Perhaps I read a meaning into your message that wasn’t intended, but you seemed outraged at this, and I don’t understand why.
Slightly confused by a whole lot of the takes on here.
My understanding is:
1) Currently the National Energy Market (NEM) does not have zonal pricing, meaning the price paid for electricity is the same across the UK.
2) While the price paid to producers is the same, the cost of producing energy is a lot easier in places with the natural landscape to produce it e.g. wind / tide / low density populations, therefore producers build their infrastructure in these places.
3) What producers do not consider is that the demand is often not in these spaces, therefore resulting in losses of efficiency moving energy from Scotland to say London.
Just stopping at this point, what the current system is doing is incentivising companies to ‘game the system’ by producing energy at the lowest cost to them rather than at the lowest cost to the consumer. Aka in a very simplified sense generation is being built in Wales and Scotland when it should have been built closer to London. Note: In reality the quality of the national grids infrastructure means it is relatively efficient to move energy from South Wales to London.
A move to a zonal system would efficiently break that even payment to energy producers, meaning as some people have said, that prices paid to energy suppliers in the high demand areas will likely increase, as will consumer prices.
This in turn incentivises investment in these areas, in particular places with the natural landscape AND grid connections to the high demand locations (London). Therefore it’s likely to increase infrastructure projects in South and North Wales at the cost of them currently being built in Scotland.
So to answer the question is Wales subsidising London?
Sort of…yes if today a zonal market in South Wales appeared it would have lower prices than one including London…however the only reason the amount of energy infrastructure has been built in Wales, which in turn gives it cheaper energy in this scenario, is because of demand from places like London.
You could rephrase this to ‘is Wales stealing London infrastructure jobs’ and the answer would be yes based on the same logic.
If Wales shut its door to London’s energy demand it would get cheaper prices, which in turn would mean the energy infrastructure would shut down and move / invest elsewhere.
In the current economy I get why people may prefer the brief reprieve from rising costs, but long term I think the loss of jobs and gradual normalisation of energy prices wouldn’t be worth it.
But hey, always worth doing your own reading of the underlying reports rather than the rage bait newspaper headlines!
Just to be clear there is a whole lot of money on the table for people here, so expect bias reporting on each side.
Generalising, the status quo crowd make a tonne of money from producing energy that the grid can make efficient use of. While the zonal crowd make money from consulting on this type of work and already being in the areas where the prices will rise.
This article felt relatively balanced and easy to read: https://www.pacificgreen.com/articles/ed-miliband-and-uk-zonal-pricing-conundrum/
What’s that Skip?
A crazy nationalist is using any scrap of information to range bate people into supporting a nationalist movement?
They aren’t even thinking about national infrastructure when they do it?
Is it 2016 again?
Wales needs to supply its own borders, not england! Scotland gets to do it, so why cant we
We need to end ‘England and Wales’ groupings like this. It’s nonsense.
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