https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_scatter/chart.ht...
Since price elasticity for electricity is very high, the market cap decreases by approximately €150,000 for every additional GWh of renewable energy production. A single additional offshore wind turbine with an annual output of 60 GWh reduces the combined revenue of all electricity producers by about €9 million per year that it is in operation.
Blocking wind power and solar projects only serves to secure the profits of monopolists and oligopolists in the electricity market, but causes massive harm to the economy.
UK has big variations in carbon intensity depending on how solar & wind is doing, so easy enough to make a small effort to align discretionary things like washing machine with that
There is also a very nice dashboard for UK grid that shows clearly what's going on at any point in time.
For example dishwashers, overnight battery charging, car charging, etc should be able to receive scheduling data from the grid to determine the best time to run.
Users could of course be given a choice whether to use grid scheduling in exchange for lower prices or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...
Edit: compare this with China: they added 315 GW of Solar capacity in a single year (2025; see page 34 of the PDF).
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci...
(You can't compare nameplate capacity directly, but it can be safely assumed that 2 orders of magnitude more is ... actually more)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/renewables-up-nuclear-down-in-fren...
It was only when Russia started invasion in 2022, that the politicians in France started to change their opinion.
If you want build a nuclear power plant you go to nuclear supplier with uninterrupted experience in building nuclear power plants, like South Korea, China or Russia.
The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn.
What you need to know is the marginal carbon cost, which will be much less variable as almost all dispatchable generation is fossil.
So yes, you should avoiding adding load when there is a severe supply crunch and the marginal power is generated by gas peaker plants (often gas turbine based), and use power when renewable generation is otherwise being curtailed, but most of the time the grid is firmly in the middle regime with a fairly average marginal cost.
The market for baseload electricity has disappeared in Germany, as renewables push the residual load to zero or below for almost the entire year:
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&l...
The base load is an imaginary line passing through the troughs of the residual load curve.
And the question is, are those wind turbines without subsidy?
Here in the Netherlands some big energy users like Aldel already have stopped, those big users are also good in up and down scaling energy usage on demand, and also those products have to come from somewhere else now, so in the end the question is about energy and availability.
Some (or a lot of) subsidies can be justified.
During day hours and with clear weather it's solar.
Currently at night in Germany it's: imports from other countries + coal power plants + gas power plants + little bit of hydro/biomass.
The plan for coming decade is to replace coal power plants with new subsidized gas power plants.
https://table.media/en/europe/news/gas-fired-power-plants-eu...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/radioactive_waste/acti...
We learned quite lot about underground migration of plutonium over millennia because we studied the remnants of the natural nuclear fission reactor which nature run about approximately 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
"Plutonium has moved less than ten feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago contained in the sedimentary rocks that kept them from being dissolved or spread by groundwater."
It reads yesterday's generation mix from ENTSO-E and the EIA, works out the carbon intensity hour by hour, and compares a normal tariff against two carbon-aware ones.
It started for Switzerland, which turned out to be a good place to start for an odd reason. Swiss electricity is already very clean — about 34 gCO₂/kWh — and yet it's one of the best grids in the set at 2.4%, because it imports from dirtier neighbours and its carbon intensity swings through the day. Louisville, at 741 g/kWh, gets 0.01%: it burns coal at the same rate around the clock, so there's no cleaner hour to move into.
Across 38 grids, the correlation between the saving and how dirty a grid is comes out slightly negative. With how much it varies, it's 0.91. Being dirty doesn't help at all — being uneven is the whole thing.
Fair warning: the demand response is a model rather than measured behaviour, and it uses average carbon intensity, not marginal. Happy to hear your thoughts.
Otherwise, there would be an obvious solution which is to increase the price all the time to reduce demand and thus reduce CO2 consumption, but it is impractical politically.
What bounds the response is not willingness but plumbing: which import/export products the supplier lets you pair, and the export limit on a single-phase connection (about 3.7 kW). I reconstructed a 200 kWh home battery on the published half-hourly rates for June to August: the exact optimum moves 50 to 60 kWh a day, and the connection is a bigger lever than the software by a factor of two to three.