Gas Power Prevented Blackout on Tuesday
I find this very worrisome:
We just avoided a blackout earlier today. It was very close.
Andreas Thingvad is Trading Director at Hybrid Greentech, which specialises in Energy Storage Intelligence, so he is a reliable source.
The X feed is from Andrew Orlowski, who writes for the Telegraph.
This incident highlights the foolhardiness of relying so much on imported electricity. At the moment, of course, the U.K. is able to plug the shortfall, presumably with gas.
The Elexon chart below shows how the NSL Interconnector collapsed instantaneously at 7.50am BST and was only back up running at full power at 9.25am.
On this occasion, it was open-cycle gas turbines (OCGT) which were quickly ramped up to cope with the outage:
The more we rely on imported electricity from interconnectors, the more we are vulnerable to these problems. And we won’t have gas power around to save us.
First published on Paul Homewood’s blog, Not a Lot of People Know That.
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“And we won’t have gas power around to save us.”
Well, I don’t see how we can do without it. Wind and sun can easily drop close to zero for extended periods – even if all the interconnectors are up and running, what guarantee do we have that they will have enough spare capacity to supply us?
We can’t for the simple reason is that we will need fossil fuel backup for renewables for years, till we can have a stable grid with just renewables, i.e. fix the intermittency problem.
50 years?
Not to mention that NetZero (aka “Nirvana”) will require HUGE amounts of fossil fuels to put in place, and rare earths as well. Maniac Miliband and his cohorts (none of who have an energy background) don’t seem to realise this. Where will all the steel for the pylons come from, for example?
“stable grid with just renewables”
Let’s leave the sun out of it, that leaves wind. Unless you have guaranteed feeds from Europe, who face similar issues (apart from Norway which uses Hydro which is not intermittent I think) you would need to have bird choppers covering enough of the country/continent such that you could supply close to 100% of maximum winter darkness demand whatever the weather, on the basis that the wind is always blowing somewhere. Probably if you covered enough of the land with windmills you would get there, but not sure how much room there would be for anything else, and a lot of the time you would have 1,000+% of your requirements. I’m not sure that can be achieved in 500 years unless you have mass storage – batteries are not renewable, so that leaves things like pumped storage – I don’t know how much space that takes up, but I reckon it’s a lot, and it seems to be built in specific sites with convenient geographical features.
To precis, unachievable in the near to middle future, ergo insane.
Unachievable given current technology I would say
And would there be enough raw materials for such an amount of turbines? I doubt it very much.
Good point
Wind turbines require about 100x the material cost per MWh than conventional generation requires. A single turbine cannot generate the energy required to manufacture its replacement during its operational lifetime and of course much of what it needs to be manufactured can only come from oil-based products.
Visiting an engineer friend in Norway in June, I was told that Norway’s famed hydro surplus no longer existed. The precipitation that refills the high altitude lakes is not as plentiful as a couple of decades ago due to changing weather patterns. I joked that its probably because most of it falls in UK on the way now. He mentioned increasing population and electric cars as part of the demand side problem which is why he retains his diesel car,
Interesting – and of course all of Europe will be seeing more demand for juice
Carpet the land with wind turbines and they’ll by design take energy from the wind, slowing the remaining wind over the land, presumably increasing the temperature as there is less wind to move solar radiation heated air around… so to avoid climate change, we are going to implement tech that will cause… climate change. Hmmmm
interesting this is not discussed more – seen some papers on it, but I think it falls firmly into the ‘we don’t want to discuss that’ category
Indeed – and have they “modelled” the effect of carpeting the rest of the land with solar panels – the ground is colder, who knows what will happen?
I’ve often thought about that.
The wind is there for a reason.
Never forget.
Nature bats last.
Peak to average wind speed is about a factor of 4, so you would need 4x average demand in wind turbine capacity and still require 100% backup of the 25% of that installed capacity if the wind is not blowing anywhere.
Is that average in relation to where the bird choppers are sited, or general? Does it hold true for where the bird choppers are located?
I suppose it’s an average of all the locations, but I don’t have figures to hand.
Indeed – you’d have to pretty confident that you’d always have enough wind, looking at figures over a period of decades, unless you had storage or non-intermittent sources. How anyone takes this stuff seriously is beyond me.
Wind is caused by air mass movements and differential air pressure, those things are pretty constant except when a blocking high sits still for several weeks and there is hardly a breath of wind over a wide area. What the Germans call dunkelflaute.
Ah I see – so building more bird choppers at some point stops helping, because when the wind stops blowing it stops everywhere? Over a wide enough area it will surely vary though – Atlantic vs North Sea coast? Different in different areas of Europe? How big would the connected grid need to be before you could guarantee max demand with just wind, globally?
Blackouts are just the thing to sway public opinion against NetZero stupidity.
So, personally I won’t be terribly upset if they happen.
It’s got to happen for people to get really really cross. And then start demanding answers. My son, visiting from France last Friday was on – on not on – a cancelled train from Manchester to Hull. He couldn’t get over how everyone around him just shrugged their shoulders and weren’t particularly cross. He said it was like it was expected…..welcome to UK transport network.
I travelled to Selby in the end to get him. No reasons given, just cancelled.
Seconded. The short term pain of disruption would be worth the outcome of putting this suicidal policy under the spotlight of rigorous scrutiny.
No, me neither – it would be interesting to say the least. I think those of us who live rurally would possibly fare the best (we are used to power cuts round here, some have been so lengthy that National Grid has supplied large lorry bound generators in the past). We have all the doings to cook food, keep warm and illuminated without electricity. People who live in cities will be hardest hit, especially if they have never experienced a power outage.
I remember the power cuts in the 70s, but the only inconvenience then was no electric light or tv. The house and water were heated by coal. A bath by candlelight was very pleasant!
By coincidence, Mr/Ms Bat, in my locale, we’ve had yet another outage today – this time as national grid were taking away the generators they had installed several weeks ago! Something to do with upgrading our end of the grid – apparently.. But I think it’s really ‘cos some itinerant people in caravans keep relieving them of the copper cables! I keep my own petrol generator handy in our redundant coal shed!
Agreed no Facebook or instagram or Netflix etc for a good while will focus people’s minds… and also give people a chance to converse and discuss the issues properly, without the propaganda of tv etc… governments should really worry about that
Ask any “green” – the Internet doesn’t use electricity. Working from home, shopping at home, never going anywhere, doesn’t use electricity. 15 minute cities and all that. Amazon deliveries don’t use electricity or any other form of energy – it’s just magic.
If only they knew… it’s a bit like people happy to offshore manufacturing etc thinking it’s ‘green’ – just moving it elsewhere, but then it’s out of ‘sight and out, of mind’ I guess
Yes it might take a blackout during Strictly Come Prancing or a big Football Match to get a public drunk on climate propaganda to wake up.
I’d vote for that now! 😉
Quite a few comments within Paul Homewood’s blog. One of them said that, as far as he could remember, planned disconnections only occurred during the 1974 NUM strike, and after the 1987 storm damage. I can remember the 1974 one. Of course, in those days a large slice of the supply was from coal fired stations. We generally had to cope with planned 3 hour shutdowns for a while in 1974.
What no-one seemed to say was that there used to be deliberate voltage reductions so as to reduce load thus maintaining frequency within the tolerable range. Typically about 6 or 12 V steps on domestic single phase supplies. Don’t know if that is still done.
Inductive loads are far less sensitive to lower voltage, old heaters, filament lamps, ovens etc – traditional old school electric appliances.
Modern electronics can be far more sensitive to this, especially if it dips or rises significantly, causing a brown-out. Quality kit is often multi voltage, however it expects something close to spec. Cheap crap kit – who knows what it’ll do… overheat, go bang etc quite likely.
I’ve noticed over the last week voltages in my area have been high – I assume due to blowy conditions and lots of wind power surplus
Could be. The other matter is that the standards have changed, with the top and bottom limits being modified. Where I am, a couple of years ago, they did a major cable renewal job and also the local transformer, so here the nominal voltage is 230 V (used to be 240 V), but at my house it’s often 235 or so (used to be 245 – 250 on the old one). You’re right about modern equipment being more vulnerable; a while back there were several rolling stock failures on parts of the East Coast mainline that didn’t like the supply, and shut itself down.
239 volts here at the moment, was over 250 earlier this week at points which was rare in the past (on euro standard)
Looked up Paul Homewood – good blog, thanks for mentioning it
Very interesting.
I’m sure it won’t be lost on Putin.
What would happen if said cables wre destroyed by, say persons unknown.
Not to worry though – Uncle Sam will ride to our rescue.
At a price.
A power cut during the rush hour leaving people trapped on stationary tube trains in pitch darkness will concentrate minds wonderfully.
Especially if the ventilation stops
In the old days, London Transport did not rely on the national grid. It had it’s own coal fired power station at Lots Road, which later changed to heavy oil, then to gas. Museum story here: https://library.ltmuseum.co.uk/portal/Default/en-GB/RecordView/Index/6
So in the late 1970s, you were powered by gas on the tube in London!
We are not meant to have constant electricity. The plan is to reduce power usage with rationing. That way we can save the planet from what the world’s greatest climatologist, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, calls ‘Global Boiling’.
Which is exactly why Miliband wants his 22 billion quid tree to capture all the CO2. Because for every watt he gets from wind he will need exactly the same in backup from gas. This seriously upsets some of the other phony planet savers as they want rid of the gas altogether. —-They want rid of it because they know nothing about how energy works.
Has Ed Miliband been asked to comment?
Informative article.
Of course gas saves us every day.