Millions of Britons could be asked to limit energy use this winter to head off blackouts by avoiding using gas and electricity at peak times and turning off the lights on days when the wind doesn’t blow, an energy expert has warned. MailOnline has more.
Kathryn Porter, from consultancy Watt-Logic, said it was possible households could be asked not to use energy guzzling appliances at peak hours or eat their dinner at a different time.
In the US tens of millions of people have been asked not to use washing machines, dishwashers and ovens between 2pm and 8pm because of the global energy crisis. Charging cars before 9pm is also not advised.
Away from the home, in Germany, street lights are being dimmed, traffic lights at quieter junctions are turned off, hot water and central heating is off in public buildings, monuments will no longer be lit overnight, lighting monuments overnight.
Ms Porter has said that it’s “very possible” the UK will see plans for energy rationing, despite Liz Truss absolutely ruling it out.
She told BBC’s World at One: “Unfortunately, as each winter goes by, the risk of blackouts is increasing because we have been replacing thermal and nuclear generation with intermittent renewables. That makes us vulnerable in times when wind output is low.
“We have had quite low wind output in July and August… Demand is a lot higher in the winter, so if we have those weather conditions in the winter, our system is going to get very tight and that raises a risk of blackouts.”
With similar schemes in California and Texas – Ms Porter expects that authorities could ask consumers to reduce their use of electricity during peak hours – although in the US all these schemes are not enforced in law.
“It is possible we will see something similar here this winter,” she said, adding: “I think it would be more an appeal or request for people to have their dinner earlier or later, or avoid using large appliances like washing machines during peak hours. I think it would be voluntary rather than compulsory.”
Meanwhile, Stephen Fitzpatrick, the boss of Ovo Energy, has proposed a plan to protect poorer households against a “winter like never before”.
Essentially, the tariffs for homes using a small amount of gas and electricity would be frozen at the current level, but the charge per unit would rise sharply once usage rises above a set threshold. This means heavy power users – typically wealthy families in big homes – would pay more for heat and light than poorer households.
She continued: “I don’t think it would be “you’re not allowed to” because there’s no real way of policing that. I think it would just be more of an appeal.”
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Variable pricing is not new. There is the well established twin rate supply (“economy 7”) for electricity, but one of the suppliers I used to use had a twin rate one for gas as well. The unit price was quite high for small volumes, but dropped to a lower rate for higher volumes used each quarter. That was nPower. The one I use now (OVO) has a single price per unit volume of gas at present.
Of course, a sceptic might observe that the encouragement of “smart” meters with 30 minute measurements via a third party opens the door for more variation.
Incidentally, what the firm doesn’t want to talk about is the complex commercial setup, with the District Network Operators (DNO) being financially separate from the utility suppliers. There is only one physical cable supplying my street, but we’ve probably got several different deals with various firms connected to it. Similar with gas, although water and sewage handling is a monopoly, which is just as well.
The UK’s net zero policy is predicated on us all having electric cars and heating our houses with electric heat pumps. If they are talking about electricity rationing now, when most people are still using petrol/diesel cars and still heating with oil/gas/wood, how on earth do they think we can move to a system based on electric powered heating and transport? There was a car advert a while back that had the slogan ‘you do the maths’ well on this one I have had a go at doing the maths and by my calculations, it does not add up. Our new Prime Minister needs to grasp the nettle, do the maths and get real on this energy net zero palaver. And while they are about it; just cancel this Autumn’s COP27 meeting, given all that is going on it will be a complete waste of time.
I will if the occupant of 10 Downing Street, the entire government and the civil service do too.
What I won’t do is turn my lights off so that “important people” and bureaucrats can keep theirs on.
Over ten years ago, I read one of many articles in Private Eye banging the drum about energy supply mismanagement in UK and its likely consequences. The gist back in those days of electricity generation from gas and coal was that some years earlier, the National Grid had worked on an excess capacity generation level of some 10%. ie we were able to generate 10% more power than anticipated maximum demand. The article went on to say that the erosion of the margin down to 4% as had happened at the time was asking for trouble. Successive Governments have exacerbated the problem beyond criticality, by paring the margin to below zero by the addition of solar and wind into the mix at the same time as destroying most coal fired power stations. Wanton and wilful sabotage.
We need to get fracking and open up workable coal mines.
The coal mines are the easiest. Fracking only if it does not contaminate ground water.
Unfortunately there are now NO “workable” coal mines.
The quickest fix would be to open up new opencast mines, but it would probably be even quicker to frack. (And there are almost zero issues with contaminating ground water. A Putin paid for lie).
The best sites for opencast have already been worked out (and risks to ground water are orders of magnitude greater, although always manageable).
Re-entering old deep mines? Possible but very expensive and dangerous (flooded with water, full of explosive gas).
New deep mines? Yes, great, still some excellent prospects left. But think 10 years, even if permission given today.
And where are the experienced miners coming from?
This is the malign purpose of Net Zero policies aligned with smart meters – total control of energy use. Welcome to the control grid!
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/contact-denver7/thousands-of-xcel-customers-locked-out-of-thermostats-during-energy-emergency
I can remember that winter in the early 70s when we had scheduled power cuts, as far as I can recall they were 4 hours off, 4 hours on in the evenings, but it alternated so you could watch telly every other night. My brother and I had some very tense candlelit chess tournaments that winter. I don’t think the youth of today would be so easily amused.
My personal thought is that virtually nothing will be done by the government to alleviate the situation to come in the next 8 months. The damage has been done, it’s too late and the creation of reliable power generation will take years to put in place. It is the poorest who will be hit hardest (not the wealthy in big houses). Most of them already pay a premium for electricity through key meters anyway. Children are going to be unfed, unwashed and freezing, the poor (and not so poor) elderly will die of the cold and also of despair.
Neither can the government keep robbing Peter to pay Paul with hand outs to help households with power costs. I would say the government is going to drive this country into bankruptcy soon, it’s deliberate and they don’t care. All part of the great reset.
yes but we stuck it to Putin! Russia’s invasion of and war against Ukraine has been entirely unprovoked! Russia’s economy is collapsing! Russian military is being destroyed in Ukraine! Rouble has tanked! We British are unanimously prepared to make whatever personal sacrifices it takes, including freezing and starving to death, in order to destroy Russia! Long live our New British Totalitarian Régime!
An excellent positive step towards avoiding this farcical crisis of energy supply this winter would be to:
Climate change is a scam. Net zero = National Suicide.
What better way to demoralise the population than to have them sitting in their cold, dark homes watching endless propaganda about how they’re helping not just the war effort but the planet as well. Meanwhile, Russia seems to be selling gas to the Chinese and the Chinese sell the same gas to us as ‘Chinese LNG’ – gas that has just magically appeared out of nowhere since the Chinese don’t have enormous gas fields of their own. So there we are all hunkered down barely able to afford the bread, unable to go to the pubs because they don’t exist any longer and the media will be spewing its vile fearporn about this virus and that virus and how we better mask up or else. Are we truly expected to take this without taking to the streets in our masses? Unless the masses wake up, we have had it.
Interestingly, I saw someone give an exposé about the Illuminati on a Telegram site this morning. It was meant to be the Illuminati playbook in fact, probably quite a few years old, well before the pandemic anyway, but each point was exactly what is happening now. I take these things with a large pinch of salt but buried in them is usually a grain of truth Something that was of interest was how ‘they’ would use the sleeping masses to dispense with anyone in the way i.e. us lot. So, it will be interesting to see how ‘they’ attack us. These people are used to psy-ops, they’re evil people and I would not put it past them to devise some way of getting ‘us’ out of the way, shutting down sites such as DS, CHD, and people like Neil Oliver, Mark Steyn and all the amazingly brave doctors, scientists, academics, writers etc who can see the truth and resist.
Can we not just turn off streetlights between 2.30am and 5.30am every night? Are there really that many people walking the streets in the middle of the night to justify such a massive use of electricity? It seems to me that more power gets wasted then than at any other time.
I watched a speech by the then-boss of a Big Pharma firm in 2009, where he stated that within 15 years the country would be experiencing regular power outages and how the company was aiming to generate all its own electricity within a decade.
This has all been planned long ago to put a bunch of globalist elitists in charge and turn us into serfs.
The way things are going, in 20 years’ time, little children will be sitting at their grandparents’ laps, wide-eyed with awe as they’re told about how people used to travel across the country and go abroad…
Stop all sanctions against Iran and Russia.the energy crisis would be over tomorrow.