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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