https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-by-fuel-type

 

PAUL HOMEWOOD

Electricity demand peaked even higher yesterday evening at nearly 48 GW, and with low winds today, power supply will be tight again tonight.

We will no doubt muddle through again, but nobody in the media seems to be pointing to the elephant in the room; the fact that demand for electricity will start to rise rapidly as we transition to heat pumps and EVs.

The Future Energy Scenarios, published by the National Grid last year, projected that peak demand would rise to 65 GW in 2030, and 81 GW come 2035:

 

https://www.neso.energy/publications/future-energy-scenarios-fes

 

Even with both the 9 GW of interconnector capacity and our full CCGT fleet working flat out, we would be lucky to get 50 GW currently. (On Tuesday I/C s ran at about 6 GW because of outages).

Yet there are no plans to build new gas capacity, the output from Hinkley C will barely offset the shut down of older nuclear plant and extra wind capacity planned could only supply a couple of GW at most on a windless day like today.

And this will not simply be a matter of an odd hour of peak demand. The FES already assumes that a lot of demand smoothing will take place, EVs charging at night and so on, so the daily range will be much less than now.

In the last 24 hours, demand has averaged 39 GW. On a pro-rata basis, that 81 GW in 2035 is likely to be at least 67 GW.

According to the FES calculations, for instance, in 2035 residential heat pumps will draw 40 TWh a year, about 8 TWh a month in winter. That works out at 11 GW , and probably a lot more in really cold weather. And that assumes they are run evenly over 24 hours a day, an optimistic assumption.

EVs will also add significantly to electricity demand during off peak.

It is therefore likely that daily demand will exceed 70 GW in cold weather. While pumped storage and batteries might help out for an hour or two in early evening, they will need recharging afterwards, so will contribute nothing over 24 hour periods.

Instead we will still need at least 70 GW of dispatchable generating capacity.

At the moment we barely have 40 GW.

Source: Not a Lot of People Know That

*****

RELATED

Starmer’s rule has barely begun and already we’re on the verge of blackouts

Power cuts or a run on sterling? Myriad disasters could destroy Keir. But who will pick up the pieces?

DAVID FROST

Wednesday and Thursday were pretty bad days for Labour. Hard though it is to believe, they could have been worse. On Wednesday evening we came unsettlingly close to rolling power cuts. It may yet happen, on the next cold night of the year. Perhaps tonight.

How did this happen? Simply put, all the many experts who run our electricity and energy industries, all those who say they know how to safely transition to net zero, all those who tell us they can be confident of the global temperature decades out, failed to predict electricity demand on Wednesday evening.

The National Energy Operator’s Winter Outlook told us in October that peak demand this winter would be 44.4 gigawatts (GW). On Sunday they were predicting peak demand for Wednesday of 43.3 GW. Yet in real life it was 46.8 GW – 2.4 GW more than that maximum.

As so often when it is a cold night, there was almost no wind and hence no wind power (and self-evidently no solar power) on Wednesday evening.

Scrabbling around desperately, paying 50 times the normal rate to some suppliers, the Government just managed to cover the gap. Even so, they would have failed if the Viking interconnector to Denmark had not been able to turn back on capacity, which was offline for maintenance – but we still got less than we expected through the interconnectors.

So if one power station had tripped off, had failed under pressure, we would have seen power cuts. At 8.30pm on Wednesday night two power stations did just that. Fortunately the early evening peak had passed. It was the narrowest of possible margins.

This won’t be the last cold day this winter. Maybe the complacent energy authorities will be better prepared then. But the situation will only get worse over time. The more renewables we rely on, the more of our capacity won’t deliver on cold dark nights, and the more we will need to find elsewhere. There is no guarantee interconnectors will fill the gap, since cold windless nights don’t stop at the UK border, and every country will look to its own needs first.

By 2030, for this rickety Heath Robinson arrangement, you will be paying towards £20 billion a year extra in subsidies, in maintaining back-up grid capacity, and more. That, is around £700 per household every year.

It’s tempting, but somewhat unfair, to blame Ed Miliband entirely for this situation. True, he’s very much responsible for originating the renewables effort in his first run as energy secretary under Gordon Brown. But net zero is a Conservative policy – a Theresa May policy, to be precise – and the previous government showed no sign of questioning it. It is our bad luck as a country to find Miliband doubling down on it just as North America and much of Europe are starting to have serious second thoughts.

The policy is a dangerous and expensive insanity that will lead the country to disaster if it is allowed to continue. But let’s face it: even now, few in politics, except for Reform, are telling Miliband not to. Tory policy, insofar as one can determine it, is a bit sharper than it was but still Augustinian in nature: deliver net zero, but maybe not quite yet. And everyone else is cheering the project on.

This seems to be the way we do politics in Britain nowadays: implement massively controversial projects across party lines, marginalise dissent and smear the critics, until the moment at which they are proven to have a point.

Then the story shifts and suddenly the taboo becomes conventional wisdom. There’s plenty of examples: lockdowns, quantitative easing, vaccine harms, grooming gangs, and more. Perhaps the net zero bubble will collapse in the same way soon – gradually, then suddenly.

If so, it won’t be through any kind of intellectual revaluation of it by Labour, the party of the establishment Blob par excellence. It will be through the kind of disaster we narrowly avoided on Wednesday night. Ed Miliband will be for the chop, and everyone will be saying “why aren’t we building more gas and nuclear?”

The Conservatives were regrettably prone to this style of politics, but Labour is the incarnation of it. It loves conventional wisdom and it is unreflective about what public sector grandees and establishment panjandrums tell it. Only real-world crisis will stop it. It’s a pity that’s so, but in the end it may be the only way.

Arguably it’s starting to happen already. Labour’s espousal of the crazy nostrums of Mariana Mazzucato and mission-led government, aka more tax, more spending, more borrowing, and government knows best what to spend it on, is already leading it to a slow-burn economic crisis. Its teacher-led education policy will destroy excellence in our schools. Its union-led labour market reforms will push up unemployment and kill jobs. And its refusal to control our borders because of its deference to the international lawyer Blob, and its crackdown on free speech to stop so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation”, is driving seething and barely suppressed social discontent.

I wrote a few months back that surely Labour wouldn’t continue being so bad for ever. I’m no longer quite so sure of this.

It seems ignorant of why things are starting to go wrong and impervious to reflection about it. Worse, this style comes right from the top. It can get rid of Miliband if it has to. I wouldn’t mind betting that Rachel Reeves won’t be long for this political world either, overwhelmed and out of her depth as she is.

But Labour’s problem is that it is Starmer himself who incarnates its difficulties. His leadenness and unresponsiveness, his now-characteristic mix of defensiveness to criticism and aggression towards his widely drawn enemies’ list, now symbolise this Labour government.

The Telegraph: continue reading

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