Bishop Hill Wheels coming off
Oct 28, 2014 Energy: grid Britain's spare power capacity will fall this winter to a seven-year low, forcing emergency measures to prevent blackouts, a report on Tuesday is expected to say.
A series of power plant breakdowns and closures in recent months have eroded the safety buffer between maximum supply and peak demand, the report from National Grid is likely to show.
I gather that ministers have been grilled on the subject on the Today programme this morning and I'll try to post some audio when this becomes available.
Bishop Hill
The National Grid report is here.
Bishop Hill
Peter Atherton tweets:
So basically if Hartlepool / Haysham dont return to service as planned before Chrismas, looks like reserve margin will be 0%.
Bishop Hill
I've attached audio excerpts from the Today programme below the main post.
Reader Comments (67)
On the National Grid website you can register to receive notification of publication of their 2014/15 Winter Outlook Report here.
Which will of course mean the sacking of Ed Davey, the man 'currently' responsible for this disaster and a review of the policies that have led us to the disaster.
It will mean that won't it?....Obviously......There would be something seriously wrong if not.
Not just the Today Programme, a renewables apologist got a good kicking from a spokesman for the heavy energy users on Radio 5. She only survived due to a complete lack of a grasp on reality and because Nicky Campbell gave her extra uninterrupted time at the end.
> will fall this winter to a seven-year low
How come it was even lower seven years ago? Have we built much since then?
It's alright. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to see. We're going to be fine. We just build loads and loads and loads of windmills, and then make everybody drive electric cars that use more electricity and then...
Oh. I see.
The present state of the grid. Was going to say the current state of the grid :).
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php
No need to worry the Met Office will come to our rescue!
"Weather forecasts will become far more accurate, the Met Office has promised after it announced a new £97 million 'supercomputer' that it suggested will even bring an end to getting caught in the rain without an umbrella. "
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/11191480/Met-Office-pledges-reliable-weather-forecasts-with-supercomputer.html
So people will know well in advance when they are going to freeze to death! Problem solved!
How many Met "scientists" does it take to switch a supercomputer on?
And when it all fails and grannies freeze to death in their flats it will be the fault of the imperialist running dogs of capitalism.
The Nat Grid report is now published, all 66 pages of it.
CharmingQuark on Oct 28, 2014 at 9:57 AM
"How many Met "scientists" does it take to switch a supercomputer on?"
None. They couldn't cope with the pause between switching it on an the control panel being lit. And it would take too long to plan: they would have to run over 20 computer models and take an average.
Also, it takes an Engineer to do such a technical, practical job like that, with a Common Purpose Graduate to manage the whole Support team including Climate Change coordinators, Diversity Officers, PR experts, Media Consultants, BBC Liaison Officers (one for each network: BBC1, 2 & News24 and Radios 1,2,3,4 & 5), Human Rights lawyers, and an electrician if anything goes wrong.
How many windmills does it take to keep a supercomputer running:
a) theoretically when the wind is blowing, just right
b) in practice
c) when the wind isn't blowing
How many solar panels (in area) does it take to keep a supercomputer running:
a) theoretically, on a glorious sunny Summer's day
b) in practice, when its overcast much of the time
c) at night
Bang goes those overnight runs!
How many fields (in area) growing bio-crops does it take to keep a supercomputer running?
And don't bother sending in your response to the Met Office as all work not peer reviewed by them will be ignored. (Note the perfect logic!)
Re Paul - Nottingham's comment.
Correct....Nicky Campbell was too kind to her. She actually cited the fact fossil-fuelled power stations had gone down as the reason to deploy more renewables! Never mind the small matter of intermittency. And she was serious, too. Barking mad.
No worries. There was a woman on R5 this morning, missed her name, Susan summat, saying that wind power was great because we can store the energy from them. Un-vucking-believable. Other bod on, representative of industrial large energy users knocked her down straightway, but she still carried on as if wind and solar would sort us. no worries.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again..Movementarianism in action.
"How come it was even lower seven years ago? Have we built much since then?"
I was wondering that. Even if we have an extra few GW of wind capacity power in that time, I'm not sure how you can ever count that as 'spare capacity' seeing it's output can be virtually zero. I've not looked but wouldn't expect more coal, gas, nuke generators than 7 years ago.
Well, I hope you are all satisfied. This is what happens when you slow down the installation of wind farms! /sarc
I wonder was the creation of the Climate Change Act a cunning plan by Ed to eventually discredit the Tories if they implemented it? It seems a two birds one stone situation may have appeared.
Will Labour slowly change their line to supporting more "clean" coal plants (or IOW normal coal plants) bringing jobs back and stopping the money grab by Tory industrialists and friends.
Maybe even bring up Nationalisation because those big bad energy companies are the cause of high prices.
Just idle speculation. But a perfect storm appears to be brewing for the party that can introduce some common sense to the energy situation.
National Grid appears to have a lot of administrative types, presumably in addition to a few engineers. For instance, om page 55 of the Winter Outlook Report 2014 the NG reckons with an Equivalent Firm Capacity (ECF) of Wind, being 23%. We know that there is nothing firm about 23% wind energy capacity. This exactly the average wind energy delivered to the grid.
So it is quite likely - see also the Adam Smith report - that during a winter high pressure spell the wind firm capacity drops to ZERO.
So, according to the capacity stack on page 43 of the winter outlook suddenly the 7.6% wind contribution drops to zero. Lights out.
Why is it, that we plebs saw this coming a long time ago? Why is it that WE knew that mothballing power stations, or closing them completely, without adequate replacements in the pipeline, ready to come on stream, and relying on the odd zephyr to turn recalcitrant wind turbines, was destined to fail big time? Why is it, that WE were aware of the hundreds of years' worth of varying fossil fuels that are lying idle beneath our feet, ripe for harvesting and use? Why did WE shake our collective heads in disbelief when the Climate Change Act was passed, knowing full well that it didn't have a cat's chance in hell of succeeding? Why could WE see what would happen in the Somerset Levels if the drains weren't dredged and regularly maintained? How is it WE are aware that the planet hasn't warmed catastrophically in the last eighteen years, wasn't likely to, and probably would cool over the next thirty years? Why is it that WE could see that minute changes in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere would have a minuscule effect on that atmosphere, and that solar activity (or lack of it) probably would?
We are ruled by nincompoops.
This is the woman who thinks the national grid stores energy for later use :
http://www.forumforthefuture.org/siteusers/sally-uren
You can hear her reasoning here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04mbkbc
Starts about 02:08.
Sheesh!
I fear Ms Uren's definition of "sustainable" is different from mine.
What is it exactly that she is trying to sustain, I wonder?
Re: Sean OConnor
> How come it was even lower seven years ago?
Seven years ago they discovered problems in some of the Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors (AGR) and had to shut down Heysham 1 (1.1GW) Heysham 2 (1.2GW) and Hartlepool 1 (1.1GW).. At the same time Dungeness B (1GW) was closed for maintenance, and Torness (1.1GW) was closed due to an electrical fault.
Soooo, apart from TAXING our economy (higher leccy price) and WRONG FOCUS (we could have put our
resources into different things than a middle age concept to drain polders and marshes), we have now also
that this windmill fiasco / renewable energy policy also SWITCHES OFF the lights, simply TURNS OFF our economy??
"dave"'s head =>=> pyke , simples.
The boy he will have to make the stark choice between bed action with that greenpiss hag of his, and keeping his head on his shoulders..
It is time he starts to review past decisions and makes some senior heads roll. Dr Paul Joseph Nurse from the RS pops to mind.
We've just bought a couple of LED lanterns.
We're calling them Davey Lamps - geddit?
This Energy Crisis is An Inconvenient Truth in The Age of Stupid.
Oh! to be a pedant,
When an error's found.
But…
Naughty Peter Atherton. The place is spelt Heysham, and pronounced Heesham. Locals get very uppity about it.
CharmingQuark,
I wonder if the Met Office have had the commonsense to install a back-up generator to keep their £97 million supercomputer running during power cuts? Hang on, did I just say "Met Office" and "commonsense" in the same sentence?
Here is a first glimpse of the new Met office super computer - Ed Davey might get one too!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
The only bright spot in all this is that this is the last winter before the election so people will notice if the power goes off. That is a great inducement to the GOVT to get off their backsides.
I will be starting my generator this afternoon...
tonyb
Morph on Oct 28, 2014 at 11:54 AM
With warnings of an increased blackout risk this winter, Breakfast looks at how National Grid plans to keep the lights on
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04mbkbc
Discussion starts about
02:086:20 and ends 12:22Salopian
You bet your bottm £ they have a back up generator. I would love to know the details. You know, fuel consumption, Mw output, switch in time, threshold of grid power before it can be switched on.
"Why is it that WE could see…" (Old Goat)
Because we are practical people. Having been brought up by practical people, I can usually look at a piece of machinery and work out, by eye, how it functions. Is this a lesser form of intelligence than being able to do the same with a verbal puzzle? Large swathes of the world of education seem to believe so. But those swathes owe much to the belief that the 'practical' is what the servants do, and is therefore beneath them. So we end up being ruled by incompetent word pushers.
Sometimes I think that the British Establishment have learnt nothing useful since the Norman Conquest. So we have to watch the rest of the world putting them, and the country they own and run, including us, out of business.
tonyb
What the hell can they do before mid winter? They painted themselves into a corner with the room loaded with dynamite.
It isn't like they can build a new nuke, gas or coal station. De-mothballing is a not quick job. The only thing they can do quickly is mount some windmills and solar panels and that's going to work really well, isn't it ?
I still can't get over the sheer stupidity of privatising the national grid. They are now a private monopoly that can charge what they like and hence guarantee profits and nice bonuses. This stealth consumer tax is like a license to print money and they use it to buy up US and European utilities.
There is nothing to prevent them from over-reaching like RBS etc. whence taxpayers would be forced to bail them out, nor is there any effective prevention of Enron style price-hiking since they control almost 100% of the supply of electricity and gas so they can happily hold everyone in the UK (endearingly called stakeholders) to ransom.
What else might we expect though in a country that actively encourages legal loansharking, car-park extortionist and pretends that bankers are actually making money rather than just gambling with money borrowed from future taxpayers.
Some energy minister on the lunchtime news "insisted" (BBC like that word) that the lights wouldn't be going out and that they put security of supply above all else, including "climate change". Since security of supply implies affordable and reliable electricity, how come they have been subsidising the two most unreliable sources of electricity generation (wind and solar), thus making electricity less affordable and more unreliable?
Clearly, for years, DECC and the ministers haven't had a clue about what they have been doing (or it is a deliberate policy by the green blob that has taken over DECC). Lunatics have definitely taken over the asylum.
@ Salopian
I wonder if the Met Office have had the commonsense to install a back-up generator to keep their £97 million supercomputer running during power cuts?
That is not a very environmentally friendly suggestion. Putting a few small wind turbines on the roof of the building would be a much greener thing to do.
that they put security of supply above all else
It is not about affordable and reliable. Security of supply means changing customer behaviour, by smart metre management, to force thm to pay if they want electricity.
If you do not vote UKIP in your next election or FN in france, you will be forced by cost to switch off your electricity when you most need it.
With warnings of an increased blackout risk this winter, Breakfast looks at how National Grid plans to keep the lights on
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04mbkbc
Discussion starts about 02:08 6:20 and ends 12:22
Oct 28, 2014 at 12:32 PM | Registered CommenterRobert Christopher
I treid to listen. Where did they find that clown of a consultant. He got every point but didn't go to explain the consequences.
Putting a few small wind turbines on the roof of the building would be a much greener thing to do.
Oct 28, 2014 at 12:45 PM | Roy
But the Mutt Orifice are such lightweights that it would all keel over at the first gust.
Don't you just love that "stakeholder participation". Pay more get less is what that means.
The essential Powercut check list:
1. Torches - check
2. Spare Batteries and/or charged - check
3. Candles and/or paraffin light - check
4. Non-mains powered phone - check
5. Sense of indignation because we've been telling them this all along - CHECK!
"a few small wind turbines on the roof of the building"
I've often wondered why this isn't suggested by interviewers when the spotlit DECC or DEFRA idiot starts waffling about renewables. "So, minister, do you think that your department could continue to function on wind energy when the rest of the grid has shut down..?"
I heard the phrase "contingency plans in place" several times this morning, but nobody elaborated and, of course, no Beeboid asked the obvious question. I'm looking forward to the revelation that the only things in place are diesel generators - I wonder if Davey actually knows this?
BTW, those STOR sets must be expensive to hire, whether they're running or not. Does anyone know how much?
In the Mail:
Will the lights go off this winter? Biggest danger of power blackouts in eight years forces energy bosses to consider paying factories to shut down
Well that's what the headline was. They've now changed it to
"Chances of the lights going out this winter are the highest in eight years as energy bosses draw up emergency plans to bribe factories to shut down if there's a cold snap"
"How come it was even lower seven years ago? Have we built much since then?" Sean OConnor.
TerryS had the details but I wonder if they're counting the wind capacity as part of the available supply?
Interesting component in the BBC's analysis of the 'keeping the lights on' piece this morning - would you believe that a cold store in Hertfordshire will be switched off as part of the cunning plan..?
So - watch out for a nice dose of salmonella to go with your candle-lit Christmas dinner...
TerryS
"Seven years ago they discovered problems in some of the Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors (AGR) and had to shut down Heysham 1 (1.1GW) Heysham 2 (1.2GW) and Hartlepool 1 (1.1GW).. At the same time Dungeness B (1GW) was closed for maintenance, and Torness (1.1GW) was closed due to an electrical fault."
I make that 5.5GW, but the EU large combustion plant directive has removed over twice that, including Fawley, Didcot A, Isle of Grain, Kingsnorth and so on.
Is it, perhaps, just 7 years since they started doing the sums, the margin being large enough not to worry about before then..? I find it hard to believe that the situation has been worse in my lifetime.
Met's just bought a d97000000 dice
I'd forget about the hiatus now. The lie that they expected it all along has seemingly taken root and with this 20-20 hindsight the new meme is that it will last for at least another 10 years of gravy-train coasting. And of course this heat is no longer even 'missing', as it is all clearly going into the deep ocean below 300m, bypassing the surface somehow (details, details), where they can happily rely on on just making the data up and pal-reviewed. That a heat-swallowing ocean would indicate a natural variation that took a sudden jump from declining to dominant only to disappear again in 10 years is not an issue as long as our mainstream reporters, scientists and chattering classes remain resolutely innumerate, illogical and anti-capitalist. UK politicians can perhaps be forgiven however as they have never had a proper energy policy nor any real idea - beyond slavishly copying the USA - for as long as I can remember.
Allan M:
'Why is it that WE could see..' (Old Goat)
'Because we are practical people...'
I wonder if there is a link between the cluelessness of the political classes and the decline in DIY - causing Homebase to announce closure of 150 stores..? How else can you explain the complete lack of understanding by politicians (and the green lobby) about the sheer SCALE of the UK elctricity generation and distribution system..?
I noticed that the Energy Minister interviewed on BBC News this morning managed to avoid going into detail about the 'additional measures' that were being 'put in place' to avoid power cuts, and not being Andrew Neil, the newsroom anchors failed to ask him what they were - because, as we all know, its diesel gen sets...
Transcript of Radio 5
Lead story, Energy, the National Grid publishes its annual winter outlook later this morning. It’s expected to say the risk of blackouts this winter has increased significantly from last year and that spare capacity in the power network has fallen to a seven year low.
But emergency measures have been taken to ensure the lights stay on. The Energy Minister Matthew Hancock says that the Government will ensure we have the energy we need
MH: Indeed there has been a historic underinvestment in energy and a few years ago we needed £100 billion worth of investment in energy production assets and 45 billion of that has happened and that means that we’re halfway there but there’s still a lot of catching up to do. We have also taken measures which will also be announced today to make sure that we have the capacity to generate the electricity that the country needs.
NC: Let’s talk about this. How are we going to ensure the UK has enough energy this winter and beyond. There will be some people listening, this presenter included, who remembers doing homework by candle light back in the early Seventies.
Sally Uren is Chief Executive of Forum for the Future an organisation that advises on sustainability. Good morning Sally.
SU: Good morning
NC: We’ve also got Jeremy Nicholson, director of the Energy Intensive Users Group. Hello.
JN: Good morning to you.
NC: Right. Sally, Jeremy. Jeremy, Sally. Sally, what’s the way ahead?
SU: Well, first of all we don’t think that the lights will go out this winter but this is clearly a wake-up call and we need to think really seriously about long-term stability and new policy across the UK. The peak demand that we’re planning only lasts (twenty?) hours or so, so we can shift the time use of our energy, as domestic users as businesses, to avoid the need for creating this over …, this, this demand. And let’s remember that it’s fossil fuel and nuclear plants that have been turned off recently not renewables and I think that, Nicky, you said about the future. The future has to be about putting more serious investment behind renewables. Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and many others have at least 50% or more renewables than the UK does and they don’t have blackouts or even the prospect of them.
NC: Mmm, Scotland’s actually leading the charge, isn’t it.
SU: It is and this notion that wind and solar is unreliable, it’s just a myth, it’s simply not true. So we need to develop policy that delivers that mix of affordability, low carbon and security, but we need to really think much more seriously about the role that renewables can play.
NC: Earlier on Matthew Hancock, the Energy Minister, said that “Sometimes …, this wasn’t his exact phrase but he said that “Sometimes the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine.” He didn’t say it like that but that’s the gist.
SU: Well he’s right, of course but that’s not a worry when we’re thinking about security of supply from renewables because we have these things called storage units, and so we have this grid which allows us to store energy and deal with peaks and troughs in demand so this notion that when the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing so does our energy. It’s just not true.
NC: Yes. Jeremy Nicholson, join us.
JN: Well, all can say is I don’t know what planet Sally’s on but it’s certainly not the same one that our members in industry or indeed anyone else I know. I wish it was possible to store electricity, these “storage units” it’s the first time I’ve heard about them. I think that what she may mean is coal and gas-fired power stations take up the slack on the regular and prolonged occasions when wind delivers virtually nothing to the National Grid. It’s costing us, by the way, two and a half billion pounds a year to subsidise unreliable wind and solar energy production and that’s set to rise to seven and a half billion but consumers paying a very heavy price to subsidise very unreliable power generation. Now, it’s absolutely true that wind makes a contribution on average but I don’t want the lights to stay on, on average and business needs that power 24/7 and it’s certainly true that business can make use of off-peak power and if you’ve got flexibility in your production perhaps you can use a little less and that’s a good thing and industry will be doing everything possible this winter to help manage a tricky situation but it can’t be sustainable to keep the lights on for everyone else by shutting down chunks of British industry.
SU: Well I think that’s interesting because I think that the last I checked we were inhabiting the same planet and I think that partly what we’ve just heard there is one of the reasons why we’re seeing resistance to the alternative forms of energy. It’s simply not sustainable to consider a future where we’re completely reliant on fossil fuels and nuclear, renewables have to be part of the mix, it’s scaleable, the price structures will work, in ten years’ time from now some more nuclear capacity will come on line but it will be very, very expensive. Solar and wind will not be as expensive.
JN: Well, not according to the Government. According to the Government offshore wind is going to be 50% more expensive than nuclear and that’s before you consider the cost of backing it up when the wind isn’t blowing. So of course we all want to see more clean energy, who wouldn’t? And we want to see our carbon emissions coming down. But we need to be grown up about this too, we need power stations that work at the flick of a switch not when the wind happens to be blowing or the sun’s shining. And the minister, Matt. Hancock, is right about this. I think the penny has finally dropped. We want to have a clean and greener future, of course we do, but it has to be at a price we can afford and it has to be whilst providing reliability and I think, you know, it’s an insult to industry to suggest that there’s some resistance to alternative energy. It’s not the alternatives we object to, it’s the unreliability, so if we’ve got reliable alternatives then, fine let’s have them, we want more of it in fact.
SU: Well, I would argue that there are reliable alternatives today. And I also think we need not just to look at the supply of energy but also at the demand side so you, yourself, have just talked about the ability of businesses to switch supply to look at off-peak supply which is great and that will help, help manage the supply of energy but actually there’s another part to this whole debate which is actually what we as domestic consumers can do and I think that we can really start to think seriously about changing our attitudes towards energy and actually reduce demand for energy in the first place. And that has to be part of the policy going forward.
JN: So, so, the future that the Forum for the Future wants is that we’re all going to use less energy, well that’s lovely if we can maintain our standard of living, if we can compete in the rest of the world, and who wouldn’t want to be energy efficient. National Grid have just announced today they’ve contracted for 300 Megawatts worth of demand response from the industrial sector to add to our security of supply this winter and very welcome it is too. But we have plans to have twenty five Gigawatts, that’s almost one hundred times that level of power on the system coming from wind by the end of the decade if it all gets built. Something is going to have to back up that power when it’s not there and we can’t have ten times the demand response from industry and the domestic sector …
NC: OK
JN: … without not lighting our homes.
NC: Thank you very much indeed and just measuring who said what I think, Sally Uren, you perhaps deserve another twenty seconds. I’ve been timing you both.
SU: Oh, thank you. I think that this conversation is interesting and of course at Forum for the Future we put the long term sustainability of business first and foremost because that helps deliver a sustainable economy. But we have to think differently about energy and just exercise a bit more creativity, a bit more imagination and look more into the long term. And I think that will deliver a sustainable energy supply which will mean that in the future we won’t have these warnings of blackouts which quite frankly is a bit of scaremongering. We won’t have a blackout this winter we just need to think much more seriously about a sustainable energy policy.
NC: Thank you, thank you both very much.
Stephen Richards
There is plenty of time for the Govt to do something before mid winter.
How long do you think it takes to formulate a robust PR campaign for instance?
tonyb