It effectively decouples for any period when no gas is needed; so if those batteries let you turn off the gas generators for an hour the price decouples from gas.
They aren't per se coupled to gas. Here's roughly how it works:
We work in half hours, 48 of them per day. If you're a very large user (e.g maybe you're a factory which makes cars), or if you choose to do this at home, you can be metered in half hours and billed this way.
In advance of the half hour, we guess how much power we might need. 9pm here soon, I reckon 30GW per the British mainland. Now we run an auction. Everybody who can make power from 9pm to 9:30 bids, saying how much they'd accept to make power
Then, starting from the lowest bids, we add bidders up to 30GW of power, those people will make our 30GW of electricity, and we pay all of them the same price, that price is last bid needed to meet our 30GW goal.
This is often a closed cycle gas turbine because:
1. There are fucking shitloads of them. Probably 35GW nameplate, maybe 40GW, that is a lot of power generation. More than any other single type (Wind can deliver about 20GW to the grid, solar is smaller, nuclear is much smaller, storage also smaller even if you count it as generation which it technically is not)
2. They are (almost, maintenance is necessary) always willing to run, for a price. Rain or shine, night or day, if there is gas at any price they can charge that price plus a little profit to make it into electricity. Only question is if you'll pay
For a typical home tariff the "supplier" you're paying has guessed that on average they'll make a healthy profit if they charge you say 24p per kWh plus standing.
They pay that half-hourly price, if they guessed badly wrong and can't cover the difference they go bankrupt, which sucks for the government who are on the hook to ensure you still get electricity anyway.
So, the de-coupling would happen automatically if the current system stayed the same but you added a lot of cheap storage and enough wind power that on average the country was mostly wind powered. Or indeed nukes or solar if somehow this country built loads of nuke stations or got improbably sunnier.
Solving the engineering challenges of "useful amount of time when the grid doesn't need any gas" without also digging into why the UK's energy pricing structure is such an outlier at the expense of consumers, seem a bit like one of those doomed attempts to solve a social issue by purely technical means.
While that is a slightly different cause, "banning nearly all construction of onshore wind" was and is a social issue. It's culture and politics, not engineering.
While this is worthwhile, I think that the parent post may be referring more to the "UK Electricity price" to consumers, and how this is calculated. It is related, but not quite the same as "roll out more renewables faster and so burn less gas"
> "If we actually paid the average price of what our electricity now costs to produce, our bills would be substantially cheaper."
> In simple terms: the price in the electricity market on any given day is dictated by the most expensive source of generation available, which in the UK would be its gas-fired power plants.
I support "roll out more renewables faster" and pricing reform. Linked article makes it clear that the UK has "one of the most expensive electricity markets in the world" and this impacts consumers and businesses.
Which does raise the question: who benefits from the current pricing arrangement, and why do they have the deciding vote?
It being more expensive in Britain doesn't mean it doesn't work the same way (just come out with a lower price) elsewhere in the world.
From your electricinsights article:
> Most markets work in this way: Saudi Arabia’s oil is cheap to produce but gets a very similar price to higher-cost oil from the North Sea. The underlying economic principle is so widespread that it’s known as the Law of One Price.
OK, I get it. The UK is an outlier in outcome, but not in process.
But I still think there's something very British in insisting "Why, it's all above board, we play by the same rules as everyone else of course. We just get a worse outcome than anyone else because, well ... um ... look over there! Immigrants!!" (I'm not paraphrasing you, rather the country as a whole)
If you want corruption it's much more up front. The Conservatives effectively banned onshore wind in England for a decade just after it became the cheapest source of electricity available.
Real Trump-level stupid and like Trump, the media seems to be actively diverting attention from it.
That and not installing insulation or mandating new homes to be better built cost the country billions and it got more costly when gas prices spiked.
The current govenrment can't shift costs from clean electricity to dirty gas, or to general taxation, because the media would crucify them. Meanwhile Farage is campaigning on getting rid of net zero and the NHS and they love him.
The same media starting a culture war about heat pumps at the moment. Basically if you assume the media and the political right are owned by gas and oil interests, the politics since North Sea discoveries make a lot more sense. It's like they were trying to burn as much of it as inefficiently as possible rather than use it wisely for its owners, the people.
We did not start to push for renwable energy to get prices lower, this is mainly a mitigation against previously unaccounted-for externalities (CO2 emissions and air pollution).
Complaining about transition costs, to me, is like complaining that industrial waste disposal was cheaper back when we just dumped everything into the next river.
At this point, there's not that much other non-renewable generation on the UK grid, so expanding renewables will reduce the impact of gas on prices (though it'll likely be non-linear).
Gas complements renewables really well because gas can readily be tapped “on-demand” whilst renewables can only be tapped “on supply”.
It’s relatively easy to turn off gas when renewables are supplying energy to the grid at near zero cost marginal cost. But also easy to turn on gas when the renewables aren’t supplying energy, or when demand spikes in a manner uncorrelated to renewable generation.
Batteries are a more elegant solution long term, of course.
Gas complements everything well. It's relatively cheap, easy to store power in large amounts and completely dispatchable. Nothing else can do all 3.
Batteries work well for short term day-to-day storage but they're impossibly expensive for seasonal storage which we will need a solution for for the last ~5-10% of decarbonization.
Probably the only way to fully decarbonize will eventually be to synthesize gas.
Gas can be used two ways: Gas in a conventional base-load steam turbine generator power plant is not easy to tap on demand. For peaking plants using gas turbine generators it is, but those are also less efficient.
The article mentions at the same site they're building a gas plant using the same tech as a large ship engines, which is an attempt to hit a sweet spot for future usage as they have high efficiency at part load.
That will never happen. They'll use that excuse until the very last gas powered plant is alive and then there will immediately be some other reason why energy prices have to stay the way they are.
Does the UK not have an option for hourly-pricing? That's usually where as a consumer you can have the most gains. In the summer, with solar panels, my energy bill is negative (in The Netherlands)
Some suppliers (e.g., Octopus Energy) offer half-hourly tariffs whose rates track the day-ahead wholesale market and are published daily. Prices usually fall when supply is abundant (e.g., windy/sunny periods)
The UK has a stupid system where the pricing for everything is determined by the most expensive thing in the mix:
>The UK’s electricity market operates using a system known as “marginal pricing”. This means that all of the power plants running in each half-hour period are paid the same price, set by the final generator that has to switch on to meet demand, which is known as the “marginal” unit.
i.e. if you have 99 units of solar but have 100 demand, 1 unit of gas plant fires up to fill it then all 100 units are compensated at the gas rate even if the wind was cheap.
You do realize that this is coupled with a 450MW gas power plant?
Gas is a really appealing backup option for both renewable and nuclear powered grids (at least in the absence of freely available hydropower).
But as installed power/capacity grows and batteries get cheaper, reliance on gas will hopefully decrease (and supply might get bolstered by renewable-powered synthgas within the next decades).
It's more about the negative effect that using gas has on the wholesale price of energy; electricity prices are determined by the most expensive source at that point in time. So we either need to get gas usage to 0, or change how that wholesale price is calculated in order to see a consumer benefit.
If the current government reversed it, the 'oh think of the children' angle from the Tories/Reform against them would be relentless. I cant say they have been amazing at messaging as it is.
The current leaders of both the Conservatives and Reform are on record as being against the Act. While this doesn't preclude them changing their mind, it does make it more difficult for them to reverse course.
Following those guidelines, how do you not end up with a perpetual 401 response from the REST API?
I understand the idea of separating the OAuth audience between the MCP Server and the REST API it wraps. What I don't understand is how the MCP Server itself gets authorized against the REST API, unless there's a privileged client (that is the MCP Server has an API client by which it identifies itself, and not the end user).
How do you operate within the privileges of the end user in that case? It seems like it would still require the REST API to accept some additional signal of the end user's identity in order to make the authorization decisions. So while the MCP Server access token is "no good on the REST APIs" you have the additional problem of either "trust me, I'm an MCP Server" or the MCP Server has to exchange the "no good" token for an equivalent "good" token that also somehow carries the index to limitations of the user (identity in the case of fine-grained access control, and scopes in the case of coarse-grained).
Arranging a reroute with ATC, explaining everything, adjusting the autopilot for the new route etc. Assessment time on what to do. Those in the back don’t need to know anything until those decisions are made and executed. It’s not like there’s a negotiation to be had!
Did my comment give you the impression I didn't understand that? But I don't think it's enough of an explanation.
> Arranging a reroute with ATC, explaining everything, adjusting the autopilot for the new route etc. Assessment time on what to do. Those in the back don’t need to know anything until those decisions are made and executed. It’s not like there’s a negotiation to be had!
Do you think they turned around before most of those things?
Do you think there were no gaps where they could have communicated?
I wonder if they actually were following "Aviate, Navigate." end of checklist.
In that case the claim boils down to "they were doing important stuff the entire time" and I... just don't believe the important stuff lasted that long contiguously.
Where does your intuition for how long actions take in a cockpit come from?
I'm not a pilot, so i have no idea. But from watching vasaviation on youtube, it always seems to take like 5-10 minutes between when they first radio the control tower there is an emergency, then they go through their checklists and stabilize things, and then they're ready to talk to the tower for the next step. Now add more back and forth and the time to actually fly to get back to a regular path, and 15 minutes might even seem too short a period of time before you've finished resolving everything and can now kick back and tell the passengers the end result.
You should watch some pilot videos online, specifically large commercial aviation videos.
Pilots have a TON of checklists and procedures. If they're up in the air approaching cruising altitude and need to turn around (even in an emergency), it's a lot of work.
They need to assess the situation, inform ATC that they are returning, copy down heading information from ATC (they generally do not just 'start turning'), start working through checklists, start dumping fuel (planes are often too heavy to land well early on in a flight), get the approach and landing procedures for the airport they are returning to, keep talking to ATC and switch from regional/approach frequencies, all while adjusting settings and doing calculations. In an emergency, they also need to report on how many people are on board, fuel levels, what their plan is, etc... all while, you know, flying the plane and being extra alert for other traffic (both in sight, on instruments, and the other radio calls) since they are deviating from what's expected.
Plus, they often have no idea what's going on, they have only heard "there is a fire onboard, we think we have it under control" from the crew.
They aren't going to talk to the passengers in a gap unless there's a major need (like Sullenberger saying "This is the captain, brace for impact". He had already committed to the Hudson long before he said that. And note that that's the minimum communication that conveys the message, he didn't spend one second on that he didn't have to.)
Before Brexit I knew tech companies where they had a UK EMEA HQ, where they would have people looking after all regions, with people living and paying tax in the UK. Post Brexit, so many people started moving home, companies started opening more local offices in region. So the people who would have been on high wages paying high tax here, sending in the UK, are not back in their home country.
AI Agents, when discussed on podcasts by tech “bros” and execs, seem to forget that most people are price sensitive. When booking a flight, we take into account cost, travel time, whether or not we’re a morning person, a meeting we need to make that’s not in the diary (texted a mate to catch up). If it’s reading that as well. I don’t want an Agent booking me something that on paper looks the best, but is £200 more than it could be with a small trade off.
Plus, these execs all have Executive Assistants that act as the abstraction layer already. This is maybe why it feels like a no brainer to them. They already share their lives with these people, why not share the same with an AI??
I don't see how that's a technological problem? It's certainly a social problem (your agent's provider might have a deal with airlines / hotels to gouge you), but there's no inherent reason why an agent couldn't be price sensitive, either. After all, it's just an optimisation problem, and the field of AI famously knows a thing or two about those ;)
