> from which you lose about 50-60% when turning it to electricity

Does this include transmission losses? I think they average 10% for UK electricity.

Figure to back this up for anyone wondering: 9% last year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/550583/electricity-losse...

Quote: Every year, the United Kingdom loses a share of generated electricity through transmission. In 2021, transmission losses amounted to around 25 terawatt-hours, or approximately nine percent of the electricity supplied in the UK that year. Transmission losses stood above 30 terawatt-hours in the early 2000's.

Yes it does. A big gas plant is say about 44% efficient (i.e. 56% lost as heat) so 10% of that electricity getting lost in wires takes you down to 40% of the original input energy.

Heat pumps don't qualify for EU Renewable heat incentives if they get less than 2.5 SFP (COP averaged over the year's seasons).

You're possibly thinking of an Open Cycle gas turbine, where we burn gas, it spins the turbine, and the hot exhaust is lost energy. The UK has a negligible amount of this in electricity production and obviously with higher fuel prices there's ever less reason to use that small capacity. The 30GW or so gas turbine electricity in the UK is Combined Cycle, so the exhaust heat runs a secondary steam turbine bringing them up past 50% efficiency.

Additionally with an ever improving grid in Europe local variables such as weather or seasons be can also partially balanced.

Yeah, another story covering this had interconnects as just below gas in rank order of usage. Also, despite that large import, UK was a net exporter for the first time in a while last year since France was having issues with its nuclear fleet.

We need to get more interconnects between Scotland and England.

They are building them, but in the sea which could be interesting with an annoyed Russia.

Wind farms were built at sea, on the surface because of nimbyism on land, but being ever cynical I think the real reason was to push the cost and difficulty up giving oil companies more time.

Later, during Liz Truss's short and disasterous tenure, just as solar panels were getting very cheap, even very low quality farm land was reclassified as a strategic asset for food to be grown on and no solar.

In what was possibly a distraction wind was now to be allowed on land (of course it's much less convenient to put up a wind turbine than to get some very cheap solar panels and that's before all the nimby groups, some of which get dark money funding).

Well, the storage bit we are a bit bad at, the Tories didn't renew one of the biggest facilities after it closed down which was inconvenient during the Russia thing.

That gas storage facility got closed down because it didn't make economic sense to operate any more - the big summer-winter price swings that made it viable had ceased to exist (possibly because more widespread use of gas for electricity generation caused more gas usage in summer, I'm not sure) and it had physical limitations on how fast gas could be injected and extracted that meant smoothing over those seasonal changes was all it was really useful for. It still didn't even make sense during the whole Russia thing.

Over in mainland Europe, gas storage was vital to dealing with Russia cutting off supplies because their gas infrastructure was physically incapable of importing gas from non-Russian sources fast enough to keep up with winter demand (if I remember rightly, even if they cut back massively on non-essential gas usage). So they basically needed full gas storage just to survive the winter, and of course Russia had made sure it was emptied out the winter before. The UK didn't have this limitation. This need to fill gas storage caused huge problems - global gas demand was already quite high and it takes a long time for supplies to be redirected and high-energy industries to reduce usage, so prices spiked sky-high at first.

As a result, mainland Europe ended up filling its gas storage at close to the all-time-high price and emptying it out when prices were much lower, effectively buying high and selling low funded by people's gas bills with the high prices being more or less a direct consequence of the fact that they couldn't just put off buying their gas until winter. If the UK government had done the same, the press here would never have shut up about how much money they "wasted" on it.

Also our sources of gas are relatively diverse and secure compared to some main land countries. The UK maintained supply just fine, the problem was price. And arguably that had more to do with lack of nuclear capacity in France.