Agreed. We use RFC language at work for documents, and whenever I see someone using the word SHOULD, I always ask what is the MAY where you don't need to do the thing? If they can't think of one, then make it a MUST. SHOULD always means there are valid reasons to not do it.
The craziest thing about UK energy is that it uses marginal pricing, where the price of energy is dictated by the most expensive generator to meet demand i.e. gas. Doesn't matter if your energy is coming from wind or solar, you're still going to be charged according to the price of gas. Until this can change, consumers are always going to suffer and think green energy isn't cheaper.
This is the main issue. People simply cannot afford to use this extra power. If power was cheap then all kinds of devices would switch to electric, especially heating and cars.
The other issue is that the UK has unpredictable weather and no way to store energy at a grid-level. It can store enough to load balance spikes but there is still nothing to replace the months of gas we once had stored in giant salt chambers (you can thank Liz Truss for decommissioning those).
Without vast amounts of long-term energy storage we will continue to throw away power when we have too much and fire up gas generators when wind power isn't making any (which happens surprisingly often).
reply