Renewable Intermittency Solved; Gas Supply Shocks Devastate Markets
Everyone keeps talking about intermittency. Let me show you two kinds. Wind and solar output varies hourly. It follows weather patterns that we can forecast days in advance. It has a well-understood distribution. We have storage, interconnection, demand response, and decades of operational experience managing it. When the wind and/or solar drops, the system operator dispatches other resources. This is a solved engineering problem. Gas supply is stable for years. Then a war starts. The Strait of Hormuz closes. Ras Laffan is hit by missiles. And 20% of the world's LNG supply disappears overnight with no forecast, no warning, and no technical fix. In four weeks, UK wholesale gas has more than doubled. Wholesale electricity has nearly doubled. The BoE has frozen rate cuts and markets are pricing hikes. Businesses with no price cap are facing existential cost shocks. QatarEnergy says full repair could take five years. Goldman Sachs says elevated prices could persist through 2027. The next time someone tells you wind and solar are unreliable, ask them this: which intermittency has done more damage to the UK economy this month? Wind variability costs the UK approximately £1.5 billion per year in constraint payments under the current (flawed) market design. This Hormuz crisis will cost tens of billions. Renewable variability is largely predictable, manageable, and getting cheaper to manage every year as storage costs fall. Gas supply disruption is unpredictable, unmanageable, and getting more frequent as geopolitical instability increases. The real reliability risk in the UK energy system is not the wind. It is the assumption that globally traded fossil fuels will always be available at a stable price through a narrow strait on the other side of the world. Every wind farm, solar panel, battery, and heat pump installed in the UK is capacity that does not depend on the Strait of Hormuz being open. That is not intermittent. That is permanent. #EnergyTransition #Intermittency #WindEnergy #SolarEnergy #EnergySecurity #UKEnergy #RenewableEnergy #GasPrices #StraitOfHormuz #CleanEnergy #EnergyStorage #NetZero #PowerSystems