Tom Haddon

She did this when Putin kicked off too.

That's evidence right there. God might be from Yorkshire, but Mother Nature is pan European (within limits).

Dunno what you're all so worried about, you know Mother Nature is European, right? She'll sort us out.

Oh look, warm and windy weather coming from the 11th.

Enough of this nonsense she says, just all this fuss is too much.

Not to be flippant but: gas.

Then eventually, long duration storage (hydrogen, pumped storage, biogas, BESS, compressed air etc) - but not for sometime.

Don't get me wrong - it was feasible, just not comparatively optimal vs the alternatives.

The alternatives being, in an emergency, pump as much money as you like through CfD auction rounds, and allow the networks to spend, spend, spend and you could crash build capacity just as quickly.

Where they wanted to come ashore as well would have created some fairly difficult system management effects (not a huge amount of demand to satisfy in Cornwall with a 3 GW connection) baking in further costs.

What I'm trying to say is it wasn't 'dismissed', it was very flawed.

X-Links was a bit mad though, and was also just trying to secure a government backed revenue stream to provide funding for the cable production facility (which we do need the cable capacity).

Government providing a CfD for generation in Morocco does bring a few questions.

Every week it goes on, every bit of the supply chain it spanners, it shaves off time at the end of oil's volume tail.

That's your positive message.

Now back to watching energy markets explode.

And substitutes are mature now, or at least a hell of a lot more mature vs whatever other cycle like this you want to point at.

If I were a CEO at an oil major, or high up in OPEC I'd be spitting feathers at the US administration.

This is actually terrible for oil long term. Conspiracy theories will be like 'Exxon, Shell, BP are loving this'.

I can assure you, the whole game in oil is to keep prices useful to the economy and not incentivise the obvious substitutes (which just happen to be clean). That's why OPEC exists.

Sorry, you used 'shield' not protect.

I can't read but my point stands, just.

All the cap does is delay the pain, it doesn't protect from wholesale, it just passes them on in a regulated way.

Every penny that is being spent on hedging right now, is coming.

Using words like 'protect' is a really wrong consumer message.

Just remember: no matter how bad you think this chart looks, it's worse in product markets (especially diesel).

Happy new week everyone.

$100/bbl is where the average person on the street really starts to pay attention!

Don't get me wrong though, Spain is in a much better spot than a lot of places right now (several things can be true at once etc etc).

It's largely an outcome of pretty much no interconnection, which actually brings plenty of costs outside of wholesale settlement (curtailment, system management etc) so no, definitely not a fair fight.

Tom's theory: Country on country comparisons for anything energy related are broadly pointless.

If it's broadly true all the time, do you think maybe the system is set up to function like that?

Just...maybe?

There are many reasons why this article is nonsense, the article actually contains a lot of them which is quite funny.

But also you could have written this on about 10,000 out of the last 20,000 days and if probably would have been true (numbers made up, I realise 20k days covers many years).

We're approaching full bingo card of nonsense articles.

You can flex production quite well (i.e. went up by 100mcm per day when Russia kicked off - I think, number off top of my head) but that is a drop in the ocean when compared to GB/Northern European consumption.

So consumption reduction is the energy security play.

There's no logic to anything apart from what sounds better to voters or what gets me an easier life as a politician in power.

Nothing is done from an energy security angle because it structurally cannot provide an increase in current or future energy security that it offers now.

The people coming out in support are always speaking from a political angle (Vince is a Labour supporter, Jackson is literally in DESNZ, Ed Davey wants people to vote for him).

It's such a boring and repetitive red herring. Waste of everyone's life force.

The North Sea is the equivalent of saying: "I'm going to make sure my house is resilient to {insert crisis here} by making sure the flowers in the garden are well tended to"

Yeh, looks nice, people will notice but literally has no impact on anything at all.

Always a fun thought experiment that whichever way you sort the arguement always ends in "do what the hell you like with the North Sea, drill, don't drill, do a funny dance, whatever. Nothing will cause a tangible impact to anything"

As always, energy commentators want vibes not outcomes.

£50 B&Q voucher to anyone on benefits that can be redeemed against energy efficiency measures - it can literally be as simple as draught excluders!

That's as low as you can start, working up to bumping the boiler upgrade scheme to £10k.

All of which would start decreasing demand pretty quickly.

Speaking of scar tissue, I'm still scarred from hearing a gov minister (I can't remember who) say consumers were protected by the price cap when prices really went stratospheric in the early stages of the Russia/Ukraine cycle.

Total lack of understanding of basically anything. Let's not repeat.

And I'm now not going to buy the 'it will all blow over' response - when you look at structural effects, even if everyone kissed and made up tomorrow, there is scar tissue now in refineries and upstream production.

The upside is this is kicking off in Spring. The impact on consumer bills may be steep on a p/kWh basis, but relatively manageable on an absolute basis as summer kicks in.

So we have until September/October to achieve something... anything.

Stop. Welfare. Transfers. To. Producers. Who. Have. Done. Nothing. To. Earn. It.

Every economist screams. Again.

Instead of subsidising consumption, to keep bills vaguely similar, subsidise reducing demand.

A huge missed opportunity the first time round when the government did nothing until it utterly had to, and was left with one lever... helicopter money.

At what price point do you get uninsured tankers routinely YOLO-ing through the Strait?

That's what I want to know.