https://www.theguardian.com/business...-year-warn-mps

As a result of past CO2 reduction policies we could be looking at power cuts next winter.

“While nobody questions the noble intentions behind these interventions, it is clear that a perfect coincidence of numerous policies designed to reduce Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions has had the unintended effect of hollowing out the reliability of the electricity generating sector,”

For those of us with a reasonable understanding of how a grid system works ythis comes as no suprise and it's not going to be pretty.

Could be is not the same as will be.

I am surprised that Brexit has not been blamed yet.

Do you want to risk it not that there is much that can be done short term.

Right, so a couple of car batteries, some caravan lighting circuits, an inverter for those annoying things that don't have a 12V version, some solar panels to keep everything charged up and a regular supply of carrots, not just for when the lights go out, but for all other times because you have those solar panels in your windows blocking the light.

And beans, obviously.

Welcome to Christmas 2017.
Seriously though, at the end of the last cold snap grid demand was in amber coal and nuclear were running flat out, CCGT was red lining and wind output was less than a giga Watt, it can exceed 5gW.
In short we were a breakdown away from power cuts because the grid has too much wind generation capacity and not enough base load capacity.

Would people be happy with going back to the having cut offs at certain times at night? my grand parents told me about this and couldn't believe it use to happen !

what about the disabled and most vulnerable people!?

So, what is the solution?

Any of you seen the British TV documentary "Blackout" a few years ago?

It was really good and showed what would happen if there was a 24 hour Blackout.. very hard hitting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3UcQj080Zg&t=2848s

What about them? The Tory government has ensured that they cannot afford electricity anyway so it won't make a lot of difference.

That's the scary bit, there isn't one, short term but it could all have been avoided if the idealistic zeal for renewables had been tempered with a little common sense.

It was the last Labour government which introduced some ridiculously over-generous subsidies (e.g. 40p + payout per kilowatt of electricity generated from solar panels, the retail value of which is no more than 15p) and the present government has cut this back to more realistic levels. Unfortunately, we are all still paying out these crazy subsidies to those who got in before the cut off date.

They happened in the '70s, and not just during the '3 day week'. Lights would go out, so off to the cupboard to get candles, or early to bed. Then when power came back, it'd sometimes blow fuzes, so I learned as a kid how to rewire those.

Nowadays with so many more electrical gizmos, it'd come as more of a shock, especially as we're not used to power cuts.


They suffer, and some would probably die. Many people's heating wouldn't work either, because their gas boilers still need power, or water pumps wouldn't work.

Reducing emissions is all very well but the prime objective of the electricity generating industry is to ensure the continuity of supply, people aren't going to care how it is generated if their lights and heating go off.

And we're still paying subsidies to scammers building windmills and 'commercial' solar, or other 'renewable' white elephants. That industry loves to point out how many gigawatts of power installed, but gloss over the variability, and that it can't be used to match demand.

So we've wasted billions on 'renewables' that could have paid to replace old coal and nuclear power stations. And we're expected to spend billions more to provide reliable power to kick in when it's dark, or the wind isn't blowing.

People will die, and all because of regulatory capture by the Greens and the renewable lobby.

ps.. this site-

http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

gives a handy view of where our power is coming from.

Looking at that grid snapshot it seems that they are over stressing nuclear and gas.
It would make more sense to wind coal up a bit and wind down a bit on CCGT and nuclear.

It does make you wonder how America do it, they are very gadget heavy yet the whole of Britain is probably the size of Texas.

I am not risking anything am I?

But 'renewables' have preferential access. And I think most of the coal fleet is still constrained, ie maximum hours they can operate before being shut down under the EU's Diktat.

Plus there's been some issues I think with the interconnecters to France, and we've been exporting power via Netherlands.. Presumably because that's more profitable than selling here.

The whole energy debacle's becoming a bad joke though. Governments are supposed to protect consumers from market failures, yet with energy, government has created the failure and subsidy regime that's lead to troughers like these-

http://order-order.com/people/mark-shorrock/

A well connected husband & wife team who've trousered millions in subsidies, and want more via the Swansea tidal lagoon. In any real market, that kind of 'related party transaction' would have investors running for the hills. But when it's taxpayer's money being 'invested', it's all Good..

If only the government had printed money and invested it in building new, nationalised power stations rather than giving it to the banks to lend to 'renewables' scammers.

The US grid is one of the least reliable in the developed world.

The way the grid is set up at the moment we couldn't close a coal plant even if we wanted to without trigering power cuts during the next cold spell and the way the grid is being run, with gas and nukes all but flat out is risking a breakdown.

Don't we have the ability to buy in electricity from France now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Cross-Channel

Yes, we can get up to 2 GW on the France Angleterre interconnector, and another 1 GW on the Netherlands "BritNed" interconnector.

That's assuming they have the spare capacity themselves. Watching those websites that show our national grid status I've noticed that recently we have been importing much less from France than would normally be the case. That's presumably because of the problems they have been having with some of their nuclear plants which means their own supply is much tighter than normal.

Subject to checking facts* something in the back of my mind about the 2003 US blackout caused by a branch falling on the wrong bit of cable at the wrong time and some automatic thingy not noticing.

And one (just a single city?) in the 70s(?) allegedly done with a matchstick though I suspect that's either a legend of a movie plot.


* OK, a bit more complicated than that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northe...ackout_of_2003 combination of trees and software bugs and procedures and a cascading failure

"too much wind"? How do the Germans cope, they have more wind generation than us, do they just have more wind?