The Alternative Green Energy Thread

michaels

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81972198#Comment_81972198

Obviously you can also avoid the inflation risk via index linked gilts but the real returns are very small. Opposite ends of the risk/reward scales.

NedS

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81972867#Comment_81972867

Linkers are really only useful in protecting against inflation shocks (i.e, when inflation is unexpectedly much higher than anticipated)

If inflation is very high then both equities and bonds suffer and neither offer investors any downside protection, which is where linkers step in. Personally, I am lucky enough to already have good protection against inflation through final salary pensions and State Pension which are both uncapped, so don't feel the need to hold linkers to protect against unexpectedly high inflation shocks (which do seem to be occurring more frequently lately)

JKenH

Despite massive increases in solar generation capacity, fossil fuel generation in China actually increased by 4% in the first quarter of 2026 according to CarbonBrief. Just adding more and more renewables capacity does not in itself guarantee that emissions will fall. The more renewables generation that is rolled out the lower the capacity factor will be - one cannot avoid the law of diminishing returns. Maybe there is a lesson here for the UK. China can afford to do this. It has renewables manufacturing overcapacity and the money the Chinese government spends on rolling out renewables stays in China and keeps the economy ticking over. That is not the case in the UK. Our economy has to bear the cost of importing materials from China which then props up the Chinese economy. Someone has to bear the cost of this and because of CfD contracts it will end up being the UK bill payer (until the price rises are so unpalatable that the costs are transferred to general taxation).

China’s CO2 climbs 2% in early 2026 due to ‘wasted’ wind and solar

China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions grew by 2% in the first quarter of 2026, after a rise in the amount of “wasted” wind and solar power.

The country used more coal and gas to generate electricity than in the same quarter a year earlier, despite a record amount of new wind and solar capacity being built.

After falling in 2025, power generation from coal and gas increased by 4% in the first quarter of the year.

Power demand grew at 5.2% and hydropower generation increased 9%. Under these circumstances, the recordgrowth in solar and wind power capacity in 2025 should have covered demand growth and pushed fossil-power generation down.

The trend was accentuated in March, as power demand grew just 3.5%, hydropower output increased 9% and yet fossil-power generation increased 4.2%.

The reason for fossil-power generation growth was a sharp drop in the electricity output per unit of installed capacity for both solar and wind power, known as the “capacity factor”.

If capacity factors were stable, the increased solar and wind capacity would have been expected to result in 160 terawatt hours (TWh) of additional clean-power generation during the first quarter, compared with the same time last year, with nuclear and hydro bringing the total to 170TWh. This would have comfortably exceeded the 120TWh increase in power demand.

However, the actual increase in clean-power generation was just 60TWh, with wind showing almost no growth.

While wind power capacity grew by 23% from the first quarter of 2025 to the same period in 2026, an increase of 120GW, the average capacity factor fell from 27% to 22%, a reduction of 18%. This implies that power generation from wind only grew 1% year-on-year. In the case of solar, capacity grew by 33%, but the average capacity factor fell by 11%, resulting in 18% growth in solar-power generation.

It is normal for solar and especially wind capacity factors to vary year-to-year due to weather conditions, but the fall this year was an extension of a longer trend. The average capacity factors of solar and wind have fallen by 19% and 10%, respectively, from 2022 to 2025.

Analysis: China’s CO2 climbs 2% in early 2026 due to ‘wasted’ wind and solar - Carbon Brief

Edit: I was unsure where best to post this so I am also posting a copy on the Energy thread.

thevilla

"Maybe there is a lesson here for the UK"

What would that lesson be?

Why would one quarter of Chinese experience lead us to conclusions?

JKenH

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82027951#Comment_82027951

Cost. If you missed that first time, the lesson is cost.

thevilla

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82027959#Comment_82027959

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82027959#Comment_82027959

But you haven't proposed an alternative (to buying Chinese renewables tech, cfd etc.) so what is the cost to be compared with?

QrizB

"Maybe there is a lesson here for the UK"

What would that lesson be?

Presumably, it's the lesson we've already learned - that having renewables in remote and low-population-density regions (like Scotland and the North Sea) demands a robust and capacious national grid so you can deliver the electricity to the places it's needed.

China's having the same problem we're having, and presumably will solve it in a similar way.

Edit to add: having now read the Carbon Brief article, I was wrong.

Yes, a major reason for China's limited gains in renewables was curtailment. But curtailment wasn't due to limitations of their transmission network.

Due to oil and gas restrictions, China burned more coal. Coal has a higher carbon intensity than gas or oil. And coal plants in general aren't very flexible; they can't easily follow demand (which incidentally was one of the reasons we have Economy 7, to increase demand for coal power overnight). In China's case this isn't helped by local conditions.

Carbon Brief reports:

More broadly, the key reason for curtailment is inflexible grid management. Flexible operation of coal and gas-fired power plants could very substantially increase the amount of solar and wind power the grid can accommodate.

Yet currently, coal-fired power generation is largely operated via medium- and long-term contracts to supply fixed amounts of electricity at fixed prices, meaning there is no incentive for adjustments in output to make space for solar and wind.

Similarly, electricity trading between provinces is predominantly contracted annually, preventing the variable output of solar and wind from being transmitted between jurisdictions in real time.

These issues have a clear impact on the amount of wind and solar that is curtailed. For example, power-system modeling carried out for the year 2023 indicates that flexible power-grid operation would have essentially eliminated the need for curtailment.

So if there's a lesson for the UK, it's to make sure your energy supply contracts include flexibilities and to coordinate generation nationally, to minimise the amount of fossil fuels burned.

thevilla

Reading more of the original article there seems a lesson we should and hopefully are learning:

"The key reason for “wasted” wind and solar generation was the inflexible
management of coal power plants and power grids, not a lack of grid
infrastructure./"

So a real issue in China appears to be curtailment due to prioritising dispatchable fossil generation.

I think the 'cost' lesson is a lesson from another political view rather than anything which can be argued from the article itself. Everyone is entitled to an opinion.

JKenH

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82028037#Comment_82028037

The alternative to buying Chinese renewables is quite simple - to not buy them. You have now had direct answers to two questions which is 2 more than Claire Coutinho got from the Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero when she asked a question in Parliament “who is responsible if there is a blackout in the UK and what would happen to them if there was one”.

That’s your lot. I am not an answering service. Please feel free to contribute to the debate in a positive way, explaining fully if you feel the trend of plummeting capacity factors and what is happening in China are not something to be concerned about. Why, for instance, given the massive production capacity and ever falling costs China is not using batteries to solve its curtailment problems. Could it be, perhaps, that, just like the UK it is building out solar and wind in the wrong places? Yes, China’s electricity generation is structured differently to ours but the fact that they are experiencing serious curtailment issues reflects the same fundamental problem the world over - renewable energy may be cheap to generate but it is not dispatchable.

Systems break down when we unnecessarily over complicate them. We are moving away from the efficient reliable generation of electricity because instead of focussing on reliable generation we are seeking to decarbonise the grid. Meritorious as that may be, it does not fit easily with a grid built around optimally located dispatchable generation. No amount of rhetoric can disguise the enormous cost and difficulties this presents. Instead of pretending renewable energy is cheap and the answer to all our problems, little more honesty is required by governments. If we want a renewable grid, there will be a lot of cost and a lot of waste and it won’t work quite as smoothly as the old one.

Irrespective of political party, every single activity in this country is made more difficult by government. Instead of letting the electricity industry get on with providing cheap reliable energy, we have to mess around with it to achieve policy objectives. Look at any industry or economic activity and ask if it is made more efficient by government policies. No. We have squandered all the efficiencies provided through technological advances by bureaucratic meddling and regulation.

JKenH

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82028058#Comment_82028058

Thank you for that considered response. You were also right with your initial response as well as the amended version. It’s a combination of issues. There is an issue in the west of China with renewables being built in remote locations, although the Chinese are far quicker to install high voltage transmission lines. There are also still fundamental problems with the Chinese electricity generation market as this article also demonstrates.

China’s new renewables pricing mechanism may not give generators the stability they need | News | Eco-Business | Asia Pacific

It seems strange in a command economy, such as China, that production (generation) has not been fully thought through and implemented efficiently (or perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised). As I mentioned in my post above, trying to achieve political objectives doesn’t always produce the best economic solution to a problem. Fully state controlled or fully private enterprises can work (in their own different ways) but hybrids rarely do and that, in reality, is what we have in the UK and to a degree in China also. In the UK the old CEGB worked and then under privatisation it seemed to. We now still manage to keep the lights on but with the conflicting objectives of transitioning to renewables (political) and maintaining grid stability it is an over complicated mess.

I know renewables enthusiasts will disagree and think everything is going well and getting better every with every kWh of fossil fuel generation that is displaced but objectively if you were just trying to run the industry in the most cost effective manner we would probably have gone about it in a different way. Compare how California and Texas have gone about integrating renewables into their respective grids. I would like to think that without government interference we might have followed the Texas model which produces significantly cheaper electricity and is a stand alone grid (isn’t that what should actually be meant by ‘energy independence’). California while running a higher percentage of renewables is heavily dependent on connections to other states and also suffers much more curtailment. It concerns me that we are closer to the California model depending on interconnectors to Norway and Western Europe. Most countries that have high renewables and a high degree of self sufficiency usually have significant hydro-electric tpresources to provide stability. We don’t unfortunately.

I don’t think it is any coincidence that we have some of the highest, if not the highest, electricity prices in Europe and California has the highest electricity prices in mainland USA.

As @thevilla said, we are all entitled to our opinions.