Anybody who has a variable tariff, such as Octopus Agile, will be aware of how vulnerable the UK electricity supply is to varying factors. Agile prices to consumers are a function of wholesale prices and these are a function of the balancing market, all changing every thirty minutes. When the wind blows, and the harder it blows, for a relatively constant demand, Agile pricing can become virtually zero and, sometimes, negative. The same applies for solar, although less obvious as we have much less capacity due to our climate. Agile users, myself included, have seen what happens to their tariff when wind and solar production becomes very low - energy needs to be procured from other sources, generally fossil, nuclear or import - and the wholesale prices goes stratospheric (thankfully, capped on Agile at just short of £1 /KWh).
Agile demonstrates that we should not maintain reliance upon fossil fuels (and T+C's of supply state the algorithm used to set the price vs wholesale market price) as it is hugely expensive to the consumer irrespective of the harm to the environment. We also need to think carefully about the increases in demand for electricity which will come from a move away from gas and oil boilers to heat pumps and from ICE to BEV. We have to get that electricity from somewhere and even with load shifted storage, it still has to be produced for us to consume.
As I see it, we need to reduce our reliance upon fossil fuels and we need to do it quickly - both for security and for consumer cost. Personally, I don't have an issue with on shore wind farms or solar, if done sympathetically. We have nine large wind turbines less than two miles away from where we live. I admit that there are trees between them and us but we don't suffer from turbine noise, they don't look unsightly, to my eyes anyway, and nobody suffers from massive house price deflation as a result of them. We also have several solar farms close by. Again, done properly, they are a thing of comparative beauty and far more appealing than a large fossil fuel power station, for instance.
The idea of distributed power sources so as to minimise the need for addition grid infrastructure has to be a good one. Using BEV's as well as virtual power plants has to be a good way to go , as is more localised power generation through things like wind and solar. But we need to invest heavily in other forms of energy generation and I would much rather see tax money spent on innovative research which ultimately turns into viable power generators than some of the other hair brain sink holes where our tax money sometimes seems to go in recent times. I wish I could offer viable alternatives myself, but I cannot - but I think we should welcome investment as well as blue sky thinking, ideally UK sourced, to reduce UK reliance upon fossil fuels.
