Energy news in general

QrizB

JKenH said:

We have seen, for instance, how the tax penalties for individuals earning more than £100,000 are in fact leading to highly skilled professional people retiring or reducing their hours to stay under the threshold - this is particularly affecting doctors. Not only is the personal allowance tapered down by £1 for every £2 earned but other benefits such as some child care allowance is lost. 

Various solutions to the weird features of UK income tax have been suggested; here's a fairly well thought through example.

https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/17/reform-income-tax-end-the-scandal-of-high-marginal-rates/

Property taxes could also be reformed.

https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/18/how-to-reform-property-tax/

My point being, there are lots of idiosyncrasies to UK tax laws and fixing them is independent of any decision to raise or lower the overall tax take.

Scot_39

Whether taxing solar would save anything on bills would depend on 

a) whether you believed it would say cut the amount exported - e.g. people might store rather than pay the taxes

b) whether you think suppliers margins are higher or lower - a balance of spot wholesale + network delivery costs paid to networks to deliver to our doors - vs that paid to domestic exporters.

It certainly might put a damper on people investing in new solar - possibly no bad thing given commercial solar are now receiving curtailment payments.   

But apart from peak demand slots - I suspect many domestic solar exporters are getting less than other renewables wholesale - like say the upto £120 OS price for OS wind in AR1 for quick delivery (£180 now - 18p/kWh) - and the c£59 that new fixed OS wind got in AR6 (*) - 2012 rates - so if it was online - c£90/MWh at 2025 rates - or 9p/kWh.

That 9p in the 8-9p range google AI gave as an average of SEG rates for last year - but said Octopus dynamic / peak rates far higher now - do they really pay upto 40p/kWh ?.

But then remember we have to add things like the electric share of the as of Oct cap total network cost of £396 - up £24 / c6% - and how that would feed into unit and SC etc etc. to those wholesale rates.