Lights on, factories off

There is some interesting stuff around in this morning's papers, which is good to see.

In the Mail on Sunday, David Rose has been taking a look at the network of green billionaires and trust funds that fuels the UK's green blob.

Meanwhile, in the Sunday Telegraph, Ed Davey is unequivocal that the lights are not going to go out. But there's a catch:

To boost supply, “mothballed” plants could be brought back into use. Generating companies could also be told to “max-generate”, running at full capacity for a short-term surge. New demand-side contingencies are potentially more disruptive. In the event of a sudden shortage of power, big industrial consumers such as factories would be paid to switch on emergency backup generators and produce their own power.

So, our heroic Secretary of State is telling us that he has got the country's energy market into such a shambles that factories are going to have to be switched off to keep the lights on.

A scandal.

House of cards?

I was having a look at the Appendices to Ofgem's Grid Capacity Assessment for 2014 (as you do) and chanced upon the section on interconnections. Now obviously, if you are going to make use of interconnections to other countries, there needs to be surplus capacity at the other end of the cable. It's therefore interesting to see Ofgem's assessment of grid capacity in countries from which the UK can import power.

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Powerless

 News is breaking of a major fire at the Didcot B gas fired power station in Oxfordshire. From the photos, this a big one which will put it offline for a long time. The station's cacacity is 1300MW or thereabouts, so it represents a pretty serious erosion of the UK's already paper-thin safety margin. Time to start praying for a mild winter.

Updated 11.54am 20 October 2014 and 13.58pm. TM

Peter Atherton, energy analyst at Liberum Capital, said that the risk of blackouts this winter was now far higher due to the UK's "meagre capacity" to absorb unexpected events.

Dorian Lucas, energy analyst at Inenco, said the long term impact of the fire on the UK's power supply could be "significant" if the damage takes some time to repair.

Calling Ed Davey, calling Ed Davey....

Updated...we would like to hear what you have to say now. 

Another 1% off grid margin

The Telegraph is reporting that the nuclear reactors at Heysham and Hartlepool that were taken offline because of cracking in their boilers are to stay out of commission for slightly longer than expected. However, more worryingly, when they do come back online they will not be running at full capacity.

The two twin-reactor plants at Heysham 1 and Hartlepool have been shut down since August amid safety fears following the discovery of cracks in one boiler structure at Heysham.

The ageing reactors are likely to be restarted in coming months at just 75pc-80pc of their usual output in order to prevent high temperatures causing further cracks, EDF said on Friday.

Both stations are in the 1GW capacity range, so we are looking at the loss of another 0.5GW of output, which could be as much as 1% of peak winter demand. Margins for winter 2015/16 were already expected to be as low as 2.5%.

I think National Grid are going to have to step up their efforts to get additional reserve capacity available.

Another parliamentary whitewash?

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee is taking a look at whether the UK's lights are going to go out in the next few years and has just published the written evidence. I don't hold out much hope for an inquiry headed by an advisor to Richard Black's ECIU, namely the Earl of Selborne, and the presence of Lord Willis of Climategate notoriety and Lord Rees of, erm, Climategate notoriety too, is hardly encouraging. Matt Ridley is the only member who might be expected to ask awkward questions.

I have skimmed the evidence and there are some quite interesting submissions, not least that of the Scientific Alliance, which got some headlines last week after they predicted huge increases in energy bills. I was also interested in comments (p. 26) by the City of London Corporation:

The City Corporation is concerned that a possible “black start” - where supply is suddenly unavailable across the whole of a network and needs to be restored - would severely affect the Square Mile and its ability to continue to operate as a business centre. We are also gravely concerned about the effect that such an event would have on London’s reputation.

There is too much for me to go through in detail. Do post anything interesting in the comments.

Quote of the day, joined up policy edition

An energy policy that has the Hinkley Point C contract and off-shore wind as its two flagship achievements must eventually collapse under the weight of its own idiocy.

The capital markets consider energy policy after Paterson's speech.

Failure to deny

Lord Deben and his team have issued a response to Owen Paterson's speech last night. There's plenty to take issue with. For example, readers will recall my amusement over their scientific travails over future rainfall, so it's fun to see that they are having similar problems with the temperature trends: they are touting a 0.05 degrees per decade rise as showing that surface temperatures have not stopped. Given that the error in the record appears to be considerably larger than 0.05 degrees in a single year, I think it's fair to say that the trend is indistinguishable from zero.

But perhaps of greater interest is the CCC's response to Paterson's central point, namely that we face a risk that the lights will go out. Here's what Lord D has come up with:

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The green blob speaks

The green blob has, after a short pause, issued its response to the news that Owen Paterson is about to issue a call for the Climate Change Act to be scrapped. In an article in the Guardian, Adam Vaughan has been around the usual suspects and has got the usual responses.

Bryony Worthington, for example says that Paterson's ideas are "bonkers", a position she reinforces with her normal battery of pseudoscience.

At the current time, when all the evidence is that climate change is getting worse and we need urgent action, I can’t see any desire to repeal this act. It’s the desire of a small group of fanatics who don’t even know what the act does.

She is clearly a "pause denialist" it seems.

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Paterson urges pause for thought

Today is fraught with family athletic fixtures, so I don't have a lot of time to write anything. In the meantime, there is plenty going on, not least the splurge in the Sunday Telegraph about Owen Paterson's GWPF lecture this week.

Britain will struggle to “keep the lights on” unless the Government changes its green energy policies, the former environment secretary will warn this week.

He will argue that the 2008 Climate Change Act, which ties Britain into stringent targets to reduce the use of fossil fuels, should be suspended until other countries agree to take similar measures. If they refuse, the legislation should be scrapped altogether, he will say.

Owen Paterson will say that the Government’s plan to slash carbon emissions and rely more heavily on wind farms and other renewable energy sources is fatally flawed.

That should set the cat among the pigeons.

Another capacity crunch in 2018/19?

The last 48 hours has brought news of yet more pressure on the electricity grid. The good news is that the year that is currently looking most likely to bring power cuts - the winter of 2015/16 - is unaffected. The bad news is that a second capacity crunch may well be looming in 2018/19.

The first piece of bad news came when the operators of the massive Longannet coal-fired power station in Fife suggested that they will not be bidding to supply electricity in 2018/19:

Scottish Power has decided not to enter the contest to supply energy generating capacity in 2018/19, arguing financial changes are needed to avert the threat of closure.

The National Grid said it had been working closely with the industry and Ofgem to review the charging regime.

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Close down DECC

The Commons Public Accounts Committee has issued a report about the award of renewables contracts. It is not a pretty sight.

By awarding early contracts worth up to £16.6 billion to eight renewable electricity generation projects without price competition, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (the Department) failed to adequately consider how to secure best value for consumers. In committing 58% of the total funds available for renewable contracts under these transitional arrangements, the Department has severely constrained the amount available to be awarded under new arrangements through price competition, reducing the opportunity to test the market and secure the best value for consumers. Under the terms of these contracts the Department failed to defend consumers’ interest. For example, the risks associated with inflation will be met by consumers with inflation measured on the Consumer Prices Index. At the same time any benefit from excess profits will be retained by the developers as there are no claw-back clauses.

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The underpinning of energy policy collapses

UK energy policy has one key predicate, namely that fossil fuels are going to get inexorably more expensive. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, the sine qua non of the whole renewables programme. Renewables, we are told, will save consumers money, and only if we dig much deeper might we discover that in fact we are actually being told that renewables are being forecast to be cheaper than fossil fuels in the future.

For years that forecast has looked ever more implausible, as all around us a revolution in unconventional oil and gas has caused fossil fuel prices to fall. Now, finally, the government has been forced to respond and to reduce its forecast prices.

Burning gas for power is currently far cheaper than electricity from wind farms, which receive billions of pounds in subsidies from consumers.

Yesterday however the Department of Energy and Climate Change released new forecasts slashing its power and gas price forecasts for later this decade by as much as 20 per cent.

But ministers have repeatedly argued that gas prices will keep on rising, eventually making green energy good value for money.

This is a bit of a nightmare for the greens in government, and it is hard to imagine that the government and its advisers are not going to have to reassess the whole renewables programme. No doubt it is not beyond the wit of the bureaucrats in DECC to come up with some plausible explanation of why renewables will get much cheaper in the future, but it will be interesting to see just how much they have to wriggle first.

Belgian brownout, German emergency, British plan

I recently chanced upon a report about the plans that Belgium has put in place to deal with its impending electricity crisis, brought about by the shutdown of several of its nuclear reactors. It seems that the country is to be divided into six zones, which will each take their turn to be switched off when the grid is about to be overwhelmed. A more detailed version of the plan, released last week, shows who will be affected, right down to street level.

We knew about the Belgian energy crisis already, but somehow seeing the brownout plans up close brings the whole thing home.

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Blackouts inch closer

The Telegraph is reporting that the nuclear plants in Lancashire that EDF closed a few weeks ago will not now reopen until December at the earliest.

On Thursday [EDF] announced that the reactors, which produce enough power to meet more than 4pc of winter demand, would only be returned to service gradually between the end of October and late December.

“Dates for returning the stations to service depend on the findings and completion of the inspections,” EDF Energy said.

The delay leaves Britain facing the first months of winter with significantly less power capacity than had been expected to help keep the lights on.

Climate emergency

The urge to do something about the alleged threat of climate change finally seems to have brought us to the brink of a real emergency:

Emergency supplies of electricity are being sought by the National Grid for this winter because of the threat of shortages of output from the UK’s coal, gas and nuclear power stations.

National Grid said on Tuesday it was extending its search for additional sources of temporary supplies, blaming emergency shutdowns at two nuclear power stations operated by EDF of France and unexpected fires at two key coal-fired stations during recent months – Ironbridge in Shropshire and Ferrybridge in Yorkshire.

Is it time that MPs demanded a statement from Mr Davey? Or do they not actually care?