Britain has been forced to pay 17 times more to import energy from Europe during the heatwave after solar panels malfunctioned and demand for aircon was underestimated, with electricity hitting nearly £1,400 per megawatt hour at peak. The Telegraph has the story.
The UK paid nearly £1,400 per megawatt hour – about 17 times the normal prices – on Wednesday evening to obtain emergency supplies from the Continent in a move set to add £11 million to bills.
National Energy Systems Operator (Neso), which balances daily electricity supply and demand, paid the sky-high prices after a shortfall in energy generated from domestic solar and gas-fired power stations left the UK scrambling for supplies.
The situation meant Neso was forced to obtain a special dispensation from its EU counterparts to buy the power. The EU has limited sales to the UK because of the effect on the Continent’s own electricity supplies.
It came after a surge in air conditioning use to cool shops and offices, as well as malfunctioning solar panels, which led to a drop in domestic power generation.
Britain has been hit with record June temperatures of 36.4°C, with the Met Office issuing a red warning for extreme heat for three consecutive days lasting until Friday.
Noémie Baud, from Montel, an energy consultancy, said Neso appeared to have underestimated the demand increase caused by the heatwave by up to three gigawatts – equivalent to the output of three nuclear power stations.
“Neso appears to have underestimated the amount of demand that we have in the UK,” she says. “The UK now has a lot of shops, industry, offices and businesses, and they all have aircon, so the aircon effect on demand definitely does matter.
“It was underestimated by Neso because we could see that the demand was actually even higher than it forecasted.”
Industry data show that at the peak, between 8pm and 9pm on Wednesday night, Neso was paying sky-high prices of £1,379 per megawatt hour – a massive premium on the usual wholesale power price of around £80 per megawatt hour.
Neso bought up to 2.3 gigawatts of extra capacity, mainly from the Netherlands, to balance the electricity supply system.
Worth reading in full.
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Why would we expect anything else from our failed system.
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Oh and the BBC is up to its old tricks again. They’ve already admitted that they are not “objective” but are “activist”. Well, in the context of piling on the alarm over the climate, today they showed harvesting “in the scorching heat” where it looked like the wheat crop was all blackened as the harvester cut it & funnelled it into the waiting tractor-trailer.
For the average city dweller this is shocking evidence of how our wheat & barley is being destroyed; to anyone who knows the countryside, the harvester is harvesting OIL SEED RAPE. That stuff which blankets whole fields in a brilliant yellow at flowering, and then goes to (the desired) seed. Where I live you can see whole fields now looking grey-black, showing that it’s time to go and harvest.
So for their example of harvest, the BBC chooses to ignore all the golden fields of wheat and barley – a truly inspiring sight – and present the grey-black “horrifying” OSR.
One day these people will have to answer for their deceit. You’d think they’d learn from the billion dollar lawsuit from Trump for their manipulation of his speech to present… Read more »
Round my way there has been the sound of mowing and a regular passing of tractors fitted with rakes so it must be silage making time.
It’s baked into Net Zero.
All part of the plan
Any system -.whatever its output – which cannot plan and/or match supply with demand as required, will fail. This is a common reason why businesses, particularly start-ups and new businesses, fail.
The UK’s electricity generating system has been reduced from a century long, well established ability to plan and match supply and demand to one that cannot.
Replacing dispatchable generators with ones that are intermittent is the reason.
This is not a revelation, so there is a wilful policy to enforce a system which must fail because it can only work some of the time, at random, and cannot be scheduled.
Sad isn’t it…
I’d say it’s both stupid and diabolical.
Net zero is an existential threat to the UK population, we really show visit that back on the architects of this insanity.
Remember that between 20:00 & 21:00, there would not be much solar PV, even on cool bright days. On calm days, it is inevitable to use some imports at present.
So merely a cockup in failing to have conventional supplies ready? Remind me what NESO stands for?
“Some imports”. We are now dependent on a predatory, vindictive neighbour.
“At present”. We do 10% a year, mainly from France. I can only see that increasing.