You're mixing up a bunch of stuff here - petrol, electricity and gas have very different markets. I think we may be violently agreeing on some points but it's not terribly clear what your argument is.
Volatility in Russia is not the cause of pushing up energy pricing. Especially when 80% of what we pay is tax and we pay huge levees and subsidies for renewables - if renewables are so cheap then why are we paying huge subsidies and levee's? The energy market has always been volatile and we've managed perfectly well over the years and energy prices have continued to trend down over time, until recently.
And what happened recently? Russia's invasion of Ukraine, panicking European gas markets and vastly increasing demand and hence prices for liquified natural gas(LNG). Which was a particular problem for the UK as we had been net exporters of gas until just over 20 years ago, but had declined to build gas storage like every other European country because we thought we could always buy gas on the LNG market if we had a problem with gas supply.
Seriously, if you look at the charts of gas prices between different countries, UK electricity prices were pretty average until the invasion of Ukraine, but since then they have been among the - if not actually the - most expensive in Europe. And that's because a) all our electricity is priced at the cost of the marginal kWh and b) the UK is pretty much unique in having the marginal kWh always coming from gas, whereas in the EU the marginal kWh comes from gas only 39% of the time and in Scandinavia it's only 1% of the time. So when the price of gas goes up 10x, our electricity market is screwed.
As for tax and levies - it depends.
Petrol is about 55% (52.95p/litre plus 20% VAT), so still nowhere near 80%. In 2023H2 :
Gas averaged 7.7p/kWh of which 1.09p/kWh was tax/levies (so 14% tax)
Electricity was 36.07p and 9.37p respectively (so 26% tax)
Renewables are not the problem in general. There are wind farms that operate completely outside the subsidy system, on the free market. Gordon Brown developed a massively complicated system that ran from 2002 to 2014 that made open-ended guarantees of subsidy regardless of the market price. Those early generators have been making out like bandits during the Ukraine crisis, and have been a drain on the system.
In 2014 Ed Davey introduced a new system (partly to avoid EU rules on subsidies) where generators had to bid for a fixed price they would be paid by a government-owned company. This works pretty well for things like windfarms and solar as almost all the cost is up front and paid for by debt, so it suits them to be paid a fixed price. The government company then takes on the market risk, so effectively when market prices are low it is paying the generator a subsidy of the difference between the contract price and the market price - but when prices are higher, they take the extra profit for themselves. This has worked pretty well during the Ukraine crisis to the extent that at times the entire "subsidy" system (including the open-ended deals) was turning a profit. And that's excluding the £1bn+ licence fees that companies have been paying just for access to the seabed for offshore windfarms.
Prices bottomed in the 2021 round, higher interest rates have pushed up prices a bit (and they are inflation-indexed in a rather complicated way) but to give you an idea in the
last auction round, if they were operating in 2024, there was :
3.3GW of solar bid at £70/MWh
1GW of onshore wind at £71/MWh
3.4GW offshore wind at £82/MWh
0.4GW of floating wind at £195/MWh
0.028GW of tidal at £239/MWh
Hinkley Point C is on the same system, 3.2GW at £129/MWh if it was running in 2024 (although it may be increased).
For comparison the current market price is about £80/MWh, so for these new projects solar and onshore wind are paying back "anti-subsidy", offshore wind is roughly market price, and it's only the new technologies like floating wind and tidal, that need subsidy, but we're building them at much smaller scale. Yes there are some historical contracts with huge subsidies built in, but they are expiring. Oh and then there's our only new nuclear plant.
We have deliberately chosen not to be and have decided to reduce our overall generating capacity and import more and more from Norway (100% renewable), France (about 60% renewable/nuclear) and the Netherlands (still mostly Gas imported from Norway and ME and not so long ago Russia), and LNG from the Middle East
Imports come and go - in 2022 we were big exporters of electricity to Europe (partly to fill in for the low capacity factors of unreliable French nuclear reactors), in 2023 it swung back the other way. Either way they're imports - either import directly via interconnectors, or burn imported gas in our own power stations. It's still imported energy either way, it just depends on what is cheapest at the time.
, and converting old Coal powered stations to wood pellets....imported from Canada!!! (cant make this stuff up!!).
Not many people would defend the Drax wood pellets, I certainly won't. But I would note that it's only about 4% of UK electricity production, and the grid people love having a big dispatchable resource in the right geographical location to stabilise the whole UK network.
You don't need to create hydrogen to make sustainable fuels, but sustainable fuel production is very electricity hungry, as is battery , solar panel and wind turbine manufacture, but so what. We have an abundance of energy around us...more than we can use or will ever need so can stomach inefficiencies and renewables are no more efficient than fossil fuels....There are massive inefficiencies in all of this stuff.
I don't really get your point here, you seem to be conflating the one-off manufacturing of equipment with the ongoing need for fuel. For instance an EV may need more upfront materials, but it breaks even in CO2 terms after around 15-20,000 miles. A heat pump breaks even after 12-15 months. And so on. The inefficiencies and the total amounts are not the same.
So everything involving the conversion of energy is inefficient at some point in the chain, but it matters not when it comes to making sustainable fuels....because all that energy can be generated cleanly and sustainably by nuclear and that energy from renewables that you're already dumping...far better way to buffer energy than batteries. Batteries are just **** precisely because of their energy density
But energy density is just not a big factor in the overall scheme of things, certainly not for grid storage. It's more critical for transport, particularly planes, but for vehicles (which is what this thread is about), current and near-future batteries generally provide enough range for 90+% of people.
For grid storage they are more expensive up front, but generally have much better round-trip efficiencies than converting electricity to hydrogen/methanol/e-fuel. So they're great for storing energy for the early evening peak each day, but they don't really work for big long-term storage to cover a week without wind. Whereas hydrogen is more suited to that case, it's more expensive per unit of energy but that's OK when you only use it a few times a year, but it's cheaper to store in bulk. And a lot of that "energy for renewables that you're already dumping" won't be there, as it will be used to green the hydrogen already used by the economy, it will need about 10% of current UK electricity production just to green our existing hydrogen use, and then more will be sucked up by the chemical industry etc to replace other fossil fuel products.