Britain “Came Within Whisker of Blackouts” Yesterday
Britain came “within a whisker of blackouts” on Wednesday after plunging temperatures and low wind power generation left electricity grid operators struggling to keep the lights on. The Telegraph has the story.
At 5.30pm on Wednesday, the spare electricity capacity on the national grid had fallen to just 580 megawatts (MW), according to data platform Amira.
That level was so low that even an outage at a “relatively small” power station “would have caused an actual shortage and triggered blackouts”, one expert warned.
The National Energy System Operator (Neso), which manages the grid, repeatedly denied on Wednesday that there was ever a risk of blackouts and insisted it had been able to meet demand using “routine tools”.
Neso previously predicted that the amount of spare power available during the coldest weeks of winter would be the highest it had been in five years.
But Kathryn Porter, an independent energy consultant, said: “On January 8th, the GB power market came within a whisker of blackouts. Neso used almost every last megawatt available.
“This should be a real wake-up call about the dangers of relying on weather-based generation.”
Paul Homewood comments:
This particular near miss appears to have caught the Neso by surprise, because demand turned out to be 3 GW higher than anticipated three days before. And as Kathryn points out, alarm bells are already ringing for Friday evening, when winds are forecast to be even lighter than last night.
Why did we get into this awful mess?
It does not take a genius to work out why. We shut down more than 20 GW of reliable coal capacity, and thought we could replace it with medieval technology that only works when the wind blows!
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I do mean to be harsh. It’s a shame we didn’t get blackouts. More people would realise what’s going on in their name.
Totally agree, as long as the country scrapes through each time, it will only be the informed such as us who are aware of the Milibrain madness. Until we see the power cuts and the Secretary of State has to explain the reason, the people who rely on the independent BBC and Sky will carry on regardless. They need to experience pain to make them rise up in protest. I am no expert, but the back of my fag packet said it cost about £4.2M to run Connahs Quay for a couple of hours, five times as much as the normal cost of electricity, so who will pick up that bill, as if we don’t know.
The Secretary of State will not tell the truth, more likely it will be the spurious lie of being Russia’s fault. I don’t say this in defence of Russia, its just a blatant lie as energy prices were already rising before Feb 2022, due to the insane Net Zero policies.
The wests sanctions against Russia has had more consequence on reliable energy supplies, before we even get to the madness of our energy policy, our shuttering of reliable supply, and ever increasing reliance on totally unreliable sources.
At night, in the winter, with hardly any wind blowing anywhere in UK, how much electricity does anyone believe is being sourced via
renewablesunreliables?The fact the grid is able to cope is a miracle.
Part of that miracle is still being able to buy electricity from abroad. These external suppliers would most definitely give preference to domestic requirements over export, subject to costs and system pressures. Our position on the international supply network puts us at the end of it, so a logical interpretation of that is, that we would be the first to be cut off.
Absolutely.
You’d have to mad to destroy your domestic power generation to the point you become totally reliant on interconnects from other Countries to keep the lights on!
Same with food security. Rewilding anyone!
Millibrain and all the acolytes are mad. Yesterdays near miss will probably have cost £50 Million to the Gas generators. Well spent money? Only if it belongs to the consumers. The cost was not down to them.
The Norwegians have already come to that conclusion, thanks largely to Germany using them as a back-up battery, which drives up consumer prices to Norwegians who are not happy.
Real leverage.……I wonder how grumpy everyone offshore is feeling towards the UK!
Like soudsofreason I also want a blackout to happen if only to enjoy watching the ensuing chaos afterwards…..
And the ridding of the Mad Miliband.
Yep – at that level it just needs one major inter-connector to trip and we’d be in a world of pain
I didn’t use my big storage heater last year, I get away with the wood stove. But people who watched the forecast heard that Thursday would be the coldest, and probably like many, I chose to get the big guns out on that day probably like many people. Like a car, you have to keep it ticking over.
They’re coming after the stoves soon, if not already…
They will have to remove it from my dead hands!
There will be a massive “department of getting rid of stoves” with thousands of worthless jobsworths! Prison if you don’t comply with The Party.
Over my dead body.
Time to sharpen my grandfathers WW1 Remington bayonet.
How do they keep our beloved BBC you going during blackouts, I wonder. I bet WFH will be less popular either the BBC staff when cuts come as TV centre will have hydrocarbon generators and food supplies, I’ll wager.
They’ve probably replaced their diesel backup generators with new ones from Ed that run on unicorn farts…
I expect the Far Right will get the blame.
Putin is already
It is going to happen soon. The sooner there is an extensive but hopefully not long lasting to cause deaths. If BESO get away with it too long the blackouts when they happen will, IMHO, be more significant.
Does anyone know how to restart the grid. How are data centres and the internet kept going.
They are kept running with Lots, and lots, and lots of diesel or aviation fuel…
black start of the grid is an interesting subject, trouble is you need rotating mass generation to do it and set the frequency… so that means hydro, coal, oil, nuclear etc – renewables no use, and even if they were, they are distributed around the grid which is down. Small islands of grid are restarted, synchronised, and linked together step by step.
These islands start at major generation site, like a nuclear plant, which uses its own diesel backup generators to run itself before it can export. The theory is out there, however it’s not something you get to practice. The UK has traditionally had an amazingly well run and reliable national grid… until the politicians started meddling and replacing the engineers
And doing absolutely nothing to invest in Rolls Royce Small Modular Reactors for 3 decades.
The last labour lot selling off Westinghouse for buttons just to get a few more quid to squander was to me one of the maddest and most stupid decisions of recent times. Right up there with the Germans shutting down all their nuclear fleet in case of a tsunami like Japan… a tsunami… in Germany… right….
Mind you millipede is making those decisions sound ok in comparison
Totally agree. We need a real wake up shock to the woke, wet wipe gullible greens.
Only when the lights go out will the shivering Great Unwashed rise up. If a grid sector dies go down, it can take days to restore it.
The Labour nightmare is already teetering on the brink with a daily onslaught of bad News highlighting their incompetence and awfulness.
It is a question of which collapses first, the economy, the grid or this ghastly Government of Errors and unintentional comedy.
If we get a total grid collapse who knows how high the death toll will be especially if it occurs during the winter. Ironically it is just as likely to happen in the summer when one source of power dropping out will have a greater effect. You have to hope it never happens as nobody knows how long it will take to rebuild the grid.
And once it’s reestablished, keeping it going is not going to get easier. Long term loss of electricity is likely one of the most impactful things to hit modern society – virtually everything will fail
On holiday in Turkey last summer I met a fellow who works in a senior position in the National Grid. Good bloke, down to earth, years spent in civil engineering and dreading retirement. I jokingly mentioned Ed Miliband’s name and his reaction was remarkable. I suppose because we had been to dinner a couple of times and shared a thirst for Raki, he felt he could speak freely and he was scathing in his condemnation of Miliband and the coterie of disciples who follow him about, importantly clutching thick red folders of notes. Having been to a number of meetings where Miliband has been in attendance he despairs for the future. He is apparently absolutely impossible to get through to and doesn’t understand the most basic laws of physics, maintaining airily that everything is in hand and on course to be done on time and on budget simply because he says so. My holiday friend literally banged his head on the table after one particularly tense meeting and was taken to the pub by his team for a restorative pint. I offer this little vignette not to point to any solution to the nation’s urgent power supply problems but to… Read more »
Fascinating. I sympathise with this person. Trying to reason with Miliband must be one of the most desperate and demoralizing activities imaginable. I bet he wished he could bang his head against Miliband’s rather than a table!
Fascinating and depressing in equal measure. I’d have bought him a pint or two as well… seen similar situations before with people like millipede
In 2008 a vast majority of parliamentary turkeys voted for the Canute Tribute Act. Sooner or later the turkeys will be coming home to roost.
What did Neso’s 1.4 GW “emergency reserves” correspond to, if gas was running flat out, “there was also no margin from the interconnectors” and the last coal-fired power station was shut down some months ago?
How the Texas power-grid came perilously close to a “black restart” in 2021:
https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-08-05/if-the-texas-power-grid-had-gone-down-it-would-need-a-black-start-how-long-would-that-take
“I think it’s safe to say it could be weeks, and depending on the conditions you’re operating under when you go into a black start condition, it could take longer than that.”
Thanks for the linked article. I hadn’t considered the complexity until now.
There are 50 days a year when there is no wind at all over the UK landmass or for 50 miles offshore. Nothing. Not enough to rotate a windmill, blow up a paper bag or blow the skin off a rice pudding. Blackouts are inevitable. And when, because there is no wind, the inevitable blackouts occur, Milliband will declare, we need more windmills!
Thick as a brush and one wave short of a shipwreck.
Net Zero Blackouts Close In
As soon as poss please – only way the masses will get it
Perhaps the MoD attempt to go Net Zero will entail modest weapons being replaced by cross bows and shields.
Why?
Because we’re governed by Eco Nutter, virtue-signalling morons …. and those who expect to make a personal fortune from the Net Zero SCAM.
Same story yesterday and today. Today is so tight that they’re using the Open Cycle Gas generators, presumably for fine balancing along with pumped storage. A faulty gas generator or two and the whole system will trip.
Perhaps we need a few blackouts to make people wake up and realise what is going on.
I remember blackouts and the 3 day week during the miners strike but we weren’t nearly as dependent on electricity then.
An additional problem is that for many years we’ve been running down our stores of gas, and now we’re running low, with no plans to extract more of our own from under the North Sea.
link to one interesting site for anyone interested – there are others
https://gridwatch.co.uk/