Pretty much all electricity markets worldwide set the unit price based on the the cost of the "marginal" (most expensive) generator running during each time period. It's a weirdly common misconception that the UK is unique in doing this.
If you paid generators what they bid, then they're incentivised to manipulate their bids to try and make the most money, distorting the market.
Almost all the wind farms and many solar farms in the UK operate under the "contract for difference" system, where they're guaranteed a fixed price per unit and have to pay back any income above that. So a lot of the money paid is clawed back through that method.
The reason the UK's electricity has been expensive over the last few years comes down to:
- Shutdown of several nuclear plants without any replacement
- Shutdown of coal plants and replacement with gas
- The Ukraine war affecting gas prices
- Clean energy surcharges on bills (which hit electricity bills a lot harder than gas bills, regardless of how clean the electricity is...)
There will be a bunch more renewables coming online soon which will hopefully start crowding out gas and driving the price down more regularly, so hopefully prices will start dropping faster soon.
>Pretty much all electricity markets worldwide set the unit price based on the the cost of the "marginal" (most expensive) generator running during each time period
Indeed. This is inherent failing of the use of auctions for setting price. While using auctions is a laudable goal, in reality it is not very efficient and easily gamed. Having a central purchaser model is not idea from a ideological standpoint but clearly more efficient allowing correctly controlling for more variables than can (crudely) be transmitted through a 30 minute auction period.
> It seems to me like this is a shortcoming of the English (and American) legal system, where non-profit organizations and such can only be founded as "regular" companies and then tax-exempted. This means they are still subject to all the normal procedures surrounding companies like sales, and still tend to have one or a few owners who are solely in charge of everything.
This isn't true in the UK. There's a structure called a Company Limited by Guarantee, which has no shareholders so it can't be sold. It's an association.
These are quite common, and in fact Freenode Limited is one. It was never "sold" in any conventional sense. There is no owner of Freenode Limited, but Andrew Lee is currently the only voting member so he has full control.
> This isn't true in the UK. There's a structure called a Company Limited by Guarantee, which has no shareholders so it can't be sold. It's an association.
There's one more structure that's (so far) exclusive to the UK: the Charitable Incorporated Organisation [1].
It can be founded as either a foundation (trustees and voting members are the same) or association (usually a larger group of voting members).
The key advantage of a CIO versus a CLG are the less onerous compliance requirements, which go a long way towards keeping smaller charities cheaper to run.
A CIO is more onerous than a CLG because a CIO is a charity, and comes with the charitable reporting requirements (and also the tax benefits).
A pure CLG doesn't have the charitable tax benefits but it's still a non-profit governance structure, and you only have to file with Companies House and HMRC. The CLG is the lowest-hassle non-profit structure.
(Confusingly, CLGs can also be charities - because charitable status can act as a "wrapper" around other corporate structures - and indeed a lot of charities are CLGs because the CIO is a more recent invention.)
I wrote about this, ages ago, I think it's mostly still correct:
Several insurance companies will pay a cash incentive to use NHS services rather than claiming on your insurance [1]. For example if you need to stay over night in hospital and choose an NHS hospital instead of a private one they will give you £50 or more per night.
Nice - my employers private health care insurance includes this and I had never noticed!
Mind you I wonder when it would ever apply - if you have a non-emergency then you will choose to go to a private hospital, if it is an emergency then you don't have any option but to go to an NHS hospital...
Maybe for people who are covered by private health care but aren't close enough to a private hospital to actually use it?
It's presumably the incentive of not using non-NHS facilities (which the insurance company would have to pay for as part of your cover). £50 to stay in an NHS ward vs a bit more to stay in an en-suite room in a private hospital.
If I had insurance, I know for sure which I would be choosing.
Smarkets is disrupting the global betting industry by offering a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team.
Our office near Old Street in London is shared with other exciting startups and has a pool table, foosball table, and fully stocked fridge.
We're heavily driven by user-focused design and a focus on technology and engineering as a first class discipline.
We write our software in Python and Erlang, and rely heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST. We build on a modern, open-source software stack which includes Linux, Vagrant, Flask, Eventlet, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Graphite, Chef, and Git.
We make extensive use of version control, configuration management, and automated testing, which lets us deploy code to production several times a day.
It's probably because modern tweet IDs are larger than a 32-bit integer. Presumably some JSON parsers aren't too hot on parsing bigints, so they give you the option of having a string instead.
We really should have mentioned them in the blog post as they're sponsoring us. It's obviously a big plus to have these being fabricated in the UK instead of China due to our really tight lead times.
They are starting with engines. The rest of their ideas are simply concepts at this stage. It's a small company.
The problem is that plenty of people have tried and failed to produce a successful air-breathing rocket engine. Nobody wants to invest any money in Reaction Engines until they can prove that the core concept that the company is built on works. And proving this costs a certain amount of cash. Some of this is being financed by the ESA, in very much the same way that NASA is financing new commercial spaceflight efforts.
In the next year or two we're either going to see them succeed and garner lots of investment, or fail and fade into obscurity.
It's not a conventional jet engine - it has an intake turbine, but it's powered by the same helium cycle used by the precooler, and not by combustion byproducts.
The compressed air (or liquid oxygen when in rocket mode) and hydrogen is then combusted in a way similar to a conventional rocket engine. REL calls it an "air-breathing rocket engine", but it shares more in common with a ramjet than a conventional turbojet.
> Here incomming air is highly compressed -- and thus heated up -- due to impacting plane parts at hypersonic velocities.
The problem is that at high mach numbers, the incoming air is too hot to successfully combust. They have to chill it (using the cryogenic fuel), and chilling it would usually result in icing.
The whole point of these tests is to prove that their precooler system resists icing.
If you paid generators what they bid, then they're incentivised to manipulate their bids to try and make the most money, distorting the market.
Almost all the wind farms and many solar farms in the UK operate under the "contract for difference" system, where they're guaranteed a fixed price per unit and have to pay back any income above that. So a lot of the money paid is clawed back through that method.
The reason the UK's electricity has been expensive over the last few years comes down to:
There will be a bunch more renewables coming online soon which will hopefully start crowding out gas and driving the price down more regularly, so hopefully prices will start dropping faster soon.