energy in UK

It's easy to tell. Sort the items into two bins, one for all items that do not vary with consumption, and the other for items that are per kwh. This will reduce the complication to an A + Bx equation. A is sum of fixed charges, and B is the sum of varying charges.

Joe

It is the amount you have to pay the last (most expensive) fast gas turbine to come online to meet demand. And yes all the other suppliers of electricity get that final top whack price for their electricity too.

The UK market is rigged in favour of the producers of electricity. It makes green energy Very profitable here since there is no fuel cost once it is installed. Capital investment is huge but running costs low.

I don't understand your question. UK is fourth line down 31.2p domestic and 29.6 industrial (the latter being a huge outlier cf EU competitors). Only the UK punishes its industrial base in such a manner.

More accurately most sensible countries allow their big industrial users to buy electricity at a price related to the total cost of production. UK pricing anomaly stems from the dash for gas tightly coupling electricity prices here to the spot wholesale price on the gas market. It used to be smoothed out by having bulk storage at Rough (but they closed that). It made sense to some bean counters at the time.

Ukraine war and Russia turning the gas taps off really set the cat among the pigeons see the second price vs time graph. The only reason that it didn't go even higher was government intervention. Obtaining enough gas during the first winter was touch and go. Lucky it was a very mild winter.

The box shifting middlemen who sit between true electricity producers and the consumers have to pay more. For them to stay in business they have to make a profit and the price they pay for wholesale electricity is determined by the most expensive component at any given time.

Consumers can choose to be on a variable tariff that tracks gas price but most lock their price in midsummer to a fixed term contract. Likewise for businesses. After Ukraine invasion that became impossible and almost everyone was on spot prices - better deals have come back.

The internal market between electricity "producers" counting battery storage into the mix can actually spike negative! The algorithms used are unstable and are routinely gamed by the big players.

Weird. Old IE wouldn't show any diagrams at all. Opera & Edge was fine.

No. Most domestic space and water heating is mains gas (which obviously is also tightly coupled to the wholesale gas price). The only people using electricity for heating either have a resistive electric fire to heat a single room they live in (quite rare now) or heat pump based CH.

Our hot water has a resistive immersion heater as backup to oil boiler (mains gas isn't available where I live) even though several of the UK's highest pressure gas pipelines runs nearby.

It is rare in the UK too. I live in a remote rural area for the UK.

Which in part is why several of the major high pressure pipelines run nearby. Most places do have mains gas supply and that is the UK norm for CH and hot water heating (moves afoot to ban gas & oil boilers though).