Kathryn Porter: The Rationing of Electricity and Rolling Black-Outs in the Next 5 Years

Screenshot_20250222-135045_Photo Overlays-power cut blackout pylons-pi

Respected industry expert Kathryn Porter details the path to the rationing of electricity and rolling black-outs in the NEXT 5 YEARS

because of “insane “net zero” policies and obsolete gas and electricity infrastructure – a life or death warning for the UK

PETER HALLIGAN

From here:

There are still many “energy realism” deniers out there that ignore basic facts.

In this video, Kathryn spells out the lies and fantasies these false prophet deniers are ignoring and who are condemning us all to energy poverty because of their wilful ignorance and malice.

Here is a link to the 26 minute video for those that want to hear the truth and the facts together with the first 16 minutes or so of the transcript.

“
Hi, I’m Katherine Porter. I’m an independent energy consultant. So, first of all, an apology for not having recorded any videos recently. I’ve actually had a pretty busy few months.

In September and October, I was speaking at some of the party conferences. I spoke at fringe events at both the Conservative and Reform Conference and I spoke at the SDP conference and a whole bunch of industry ones as well. And I’ve also done a lot of podcasts, quite a lot, two a week at one point. If you Google my name and click on video, uh you’ll find most of them there. Now, the most noteworthy one I think was probably the trigonometry podcast. It’s been quite widely viewed and the hosts there, Constantin and Francis were quite shocked with what I had to say. That’s been a general feedback that I’ve received from people who watched it who aren’t necessarily following what’s happening in energy all that closely. And I’m pretty glad because it was my objective to shock people.

What’s happening at the moment in energy policy is shocking and not least today’s announcements of the new subsidies AR7 – is extremely disappointing. I’ll be recording another video on that in the next few days.

We’re locking in I’m wateringly high prices for 20 years instead of 15.

The idea that this is in any way beneficial for consumers is simply a fantasy, but that’s for another video.

So, what else have I been doing? I’ve written two really big reports. One will be published next month by the Institute for Economic Affairs and that’s called “Can We Just Stop Oil.

They’re going to publish it when I come back from my travels. I’m currently in the United States. I’m recording this in Houston. I’ll be off to Austin and then to San Antonio for the Power Gen Conference. Then I’m going to head over to New York City for a symposium on nuclear financing and then I’ll be going up to Canada.

If there are any industry people who’d like to meet up while I’m on my travels in Canada, I’m visiting Toronto, Niagara, and Calgary.

Please let me know, send me a direct message or contact me through my website and we’ll see if we can schedule something. My other big report was called “Electrification can the grid Cope”.

It was published on Monday and we had a launch event that was very kindly hosted by shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (DEZNEZ), Claire Coutinho.

Here is a hard copy of my report. You can see it’s a pretty thick document. I’ve got over 200 references in this document. It was not written by AI as somebody suggested. It was written all by me. I look at electrification and the impact it will have on our power grids and again it’s also had a fair bit of attention.

DEZNES very kindly told the world that I was scaremongering before they even read the report which was quite interesting. It’s good to know that they put so much rigor behind their commentary!!

So what do I say in my report? Now, electrification has become the default answer to pretty much every question on climate and energy, whether that’s heating, transport, or industry, the answer seems to be to electrify it.

Now, up until a couple of years ago, hydrogen was expected to play some kind of a role in this, but since the village trials were cancelled, that’s really fallen away, other than for maybe a few high temperature heat applications in industry. And similarly, there’s not that much belief that carbon capture is going to contribute. The National Energy System operator, NESO, does still feature it in in its scenarios, but you know, the climate change committee only really sees it playing a pretty small role. And I think I would

agree with that. Although Labour is throwing a lot of money at it, we’ve seen billions of dollars worldwide spent on carbon capture in in the last couple of decades, there’s really very little to show for it.

I don’t think it’s credible that Britain is going to suddenly change the tide on that irrespective of how many millions of pounds that Ed Miliband wants to throw in that direction.

So what are our targets then for electrification? My analysis shows that if we electrify heating, transport and industry in line with government targets, we’ll probably see between 7 and 10 GW of additional electricity demand to 2030.

Now I also include data centers in my analysis and that will add probably add another seven GW over the same time frame if government targets were met. The government has designated AI data centers as critical national infrastructure. So this is a pretty significant amount of new electricity demand that we could see.

And to put it into context our peak winter demand is somewhere around 45GW. In the cold weather a couple of weeks ago we actually went over 51 but that’s a little bit unusual. Normally on an average winter day, 45 GW would be our peak demand at dinnertime. And so if we electrified heating and transport and we had this additional demand from AI data sensors, we’d be adding another 25% to our electricity demand. So it’s a pretty significant amount.

Now, if we look at how those targets break out, the government’s very keen on heat pumps. They’ve introduced a boiler tax. But you know these targets are just not going to be met without actually imposing some sort of compulsion on consumers. And while this Labour government does seem to be quite keen on compulsion, it also is quite keen on U-turns when it realizes the extent of public opposition.

The current heat pump targets rely on a rate of deployment that is just not plausible under current conditions. Consumer resistance remains high. Installer numbers are growing too slowly. And as the capital and running costs for heat pumps are materially higher than for gas heating, it just doesn’t seem very credible that that’s going to change anytime soon. Even where heat pump subsidies cover the upfront cost of the heat pump itself and bring it to broadly par with gas boilers. Because heat pumps deliver low grade heat, you pretty much have to change the whole way that your house is configured for heating. Unless your house is already very well insulated, which isn’t the case for most people, you’ll need better insulation. And heat pumps deliver low-grade heat. So, you generally need to have a bigger emitter, the larger radiator or an underfloor system to deliver that heat. It just has to be bigger because the heating is low grade. And often that will also require additional pipe work. So, there’s quite a lot of cost that you have to go to and obviously that undermines people’s desire to do that work. It’s intrusive and expensive.

Now, if we look at transportation, you see similar challenges. Consumers are not racing out to buy electric cars. There’s still a lot of concern around range anxiety. And my report looks at the costs of owning an electric car compared with owning a conventional car. And finds that really only in the first year or so of ownership. If you can charge that electric car at home using a flexible tariff, will you actually achieve a cost saving versus a conventional car. After that first year or so, you see the costs of insurance and maintenance overtaking conventional car costs pretty quickly because those are just higher for electric cars. When it comes to larger vehicles, there are no current credible fast charging solutions for HGVs.

And you know, I had a meeting recently with a big logistics company. And they explained to me that if they were to electrify their operations, it would mean a radical change of the way they operate their business. They would potentially have to change the location of their depots, and that would be inefficient because they’re currently located for efficiency for their operations. and they would likely have to change the working patterns and employment contracts of all their drivers. At the moment, when you’re fuelling a vehicle, you are responsible for the vehicle. So, a driver cannot be on a break if they’re fuelling their vehicle away from the depot. And about 50% of their fuelling takes place away from the depot. So that will have a huge impact on their operations and the cost of their operations because they effectively have to pay their drivers to sit around just watching their vehicles charge and for trucks that can take several hours. So this was just really not plausible. Similarly, when you look at buses outside of large urban areas where buses can return to depots quite frequently, you you very quickly run into issues with charging infrastructure.

Industry is another area where electrification faces real challenges.

My report contains a case study that illustrates some of these. Industrial sites might not have the space for the electrical equipment and charging devices that they would need. But also they face issues with high prices. High electricity prices are driving de-industrialization at a record rate at the moment. We have the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world. And we can tell we can see that in the data, de-industrialization is driving reductions in electricity demand that are larger than increases from electrification.

That’s the that’s the driving narrative of electricity demand across the entire economy at the moment.

And it’s just not credible that that’s going to reverse in the next 5 years. So across all of these sectors, the modelling assumptions used by both NESO and the climate change committee are based on behavioural and technological assumptions that just are not credible. and they’re also inconsistent across their scenarios.

My report doesn’t assume electrification won’t happen, but it does it does find that the targets are not going to be met without some form of compulsion. And that’s going to bring all sorts of political risks that are just not likely it just makes that pretty unlikely.

And this is just as well because the main finding of my report is that our electricity grid is going to struggle to cope with normal power demand, never mind additional demand from electrification and data centers.

The biggest risk that we face is from retirement of firm generation. Now, as I mentioned earlier, we’ve just had the new auction round for renewables and the government and renewable lobbies are very predictably banging on about how this is going to improve security of supply. It doesn’t. We still have the issue of when it’s not windy.

Right now, we have about 32,000 megawatts of wind generation connected to the grid. But over the autumn, we had several occasions where the actual electricity generated by those renewables fell down to 200 megawatt. So, 200 out of 32,000. That’s a tiny amount.

Now, for a joke, I asked Grok how much electricity could be generated if every person in the UK went and blew very hard into a wind turbine. and Grok’s at about 200 megawatt. Funny, but really not so much when you consider what happens when you run out of electricity.

So, we need to keep our firm power generation running. But we know there’s a lot of us at risk of closure. Now, definitely we’re going to lose just under 5 gigawatts of nuclear. The advanced gas coal reactors are coming to the end of their lives. And at the moment, they’re all scheduled to close by March 2030. Now I believe that two of them Torres and Hishian 2 might be able to run for another two years after that but I think 2032 is a hard limit.

So that will leave Sizewell B. Now we’re building Hinckley point C that’s currently scheduled to open the first unit in 2029. Nobody believes that’s going to happen. It’s far more likely to be in the early 2030s with the second unit following a year or two behind. So there’s 5 GW of uh nuclear generation likely to close with 3.2 gigawatt likely to open and I think we’ll probably see a couple of gigawatts of small gas fire generation opening. So that kind of evens out. But the real risk that nobody’s talking about is that the existing gas fleet can’t be reasonably assumed to remain open, in well it definitely won’t remain open indefinitely. The clean power 2030 plan requires that all 32 gigawatts of the gas fleet that we currently have will stay open. And even if it’s only used 5% of the time, that’s very crucial because when it’s not windy or sunny, we will rely on those power stations to meet demand. And here’s the rub. A third of those power stations were built in the1990s and are coming to the end of life. And another third were built in the 2000s.And we’re already seeing reliability issues with some of those assets. Now I take two of them, Peterhead and Langage in my report.

Now Peterhead was built in 2000 and Langage was built in 2010. Both are experiencing significant reliability issues and there are issues with other assets as well. And Im’ hoping to get funding for a follow-up report which will go into reliability data for all of the at risk power stations I’ve identified. And I’ve identified 12 gigawatt of at risk capacity. So that’s 12,000 megawatt, that that you know that could potentially close. Now the obvious response to that is well replace them or upgrade them. And that’s this is where the trouble comes in. Right now if you want to replace a gas fired power station with an entirely new gas fired power station, you’re going to wait seven to eight years to take delivery for of a gas turbine because of supply chain constraints. To get a new rotor to extend the life of an existing power station, it’s a five year wait. To even get the components for major maintenance is taking a year and a half. So these are significant constraints. We would really need to be acting now ordering this equipment to be sure that it comes by 2030 so that we still have it available and that isn’t happening. So we have this enormous risk that our gas generation will close due to old age and just simply won’t be able to run. The other problem is that running these types of machines for only 5% of the time actually creates reliability problems.

So the idea that you would take decades old machines that are nearing the end of their life and make them operate in a way they were never designed to and that they will just work and keep working just isn’t credible.

Now, Britain isn’t alone with facing these system adequacy concerns. my report looks at Norway,”…

end of transcript – sorry I’m tired correcting it! Here’s the rest of the 5 minutes of uncorrected transcript.

the Netherlands, and Germany to see