There's a lot to unpack there, and on some of it you are mistaken.
I am not ignoring the intermitency, energy storage is a lot cheaper than continually having to buy more oil, gas and coal, and it is getting a lot cheaper.
You are forgetting the enormous cost of commissioning a new power station and Hinkley Point C costs continue to rise and it still isn't running yet. Then, after it is closed down after 30 years, it costs billions more to decommission it.
I didn't actually mention nuclear, but was comparing principally against gas backed with storage.
I don't agree that storage is cheaper: where do you get that from? In practice storage is impractical at the scale we need it today, let alone with the increasing share of renewables. That will hopefully change with time, but is likely to take a lot longer than the pace we are trying to go at.
You are right about the cost of conventional nuclear. It remains to be seen if the SMR (small modular reactor) concepts work out or not (from a cost perspective - they are clearly technically possible, but may not deliver the claimed benefits).
As for your energy bills, I thought everyone knew now that the cost of electricity is dictated by the price of gas. even if it's the smallest percentage of the energy mix on a given day. Politicians are lobbying for this to change to get people out of energy poverty.
Yes, because of the need for gas-powered backup (which is the only practical solution we have now that coal is banned - given the impracticality of biomass)! If we won't pay what is needed for gas backup, nobody will provide it and then the lights go out.
This is actually really hard to change because if you think about it: whatever the most expensive technology you have to have in your energy mix will set the minimum price, or you won't have it.
It is also worth pointing out that wholesale energy costs (driven principally by gas, as you say), only make up about 40-45% of the price people pay, the rest are levies, network costs, taxes and policies which are the reason that we pay the highest prices in the world for our energy.
One day batteries might be cheap enough that we could have massive-scale storage and store perhaps 3-4 days energy needs for times of low windspeed in winter sun. But right now it would cost many orders of magnitude more than our GDP!
Please tell me what other form of storage technology is:
- Possible at the required scale.
- Cheap enough.
- Ready to go now (or at least in the next few years).
People in the energy industry are now looking at decentralised local grids with house batteries and V2G support.
That's definitely worth a try. For those that can afford it.
It is (just) possible that local backup is the answer if:
- Prices can be made low enough.
- The 30+ million existing homes and 6+ million existing businesses can be retrofitted.
But that is going to take decades.
I fear the only really practical route forward is to:
- Stretch the transition out over a much longer period of time.
- Use the savings to cut bills in the meantime.
- Invest in novel forms of storage and many experiments.
