Britain built its power stations in the middle. The wind is at the edges.

I let a model choose where to put Britain's wind and solar, with no network, no planning system and no existing fleet. It emptied the middle of the country.

Last week I wrote about learning PyPSA, the open-source power system model, and used it to rerun a single day of Britain's gas fleet. That is the easy rung of the ladder: the plants exist, and you ask which of them runs.

This is the rung above. Stop telling the model what exists. Give it the cost of a turbine, the cost of a panel, the cost of a battery, …