From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

We came perilously close to rolling blackouts yesterday, something which I have not seen reported in the media – (correct me, I may be wrong!!).

The ever-alert Kathryn Porter has the full story here.

This is her conclusion:

The reference to the Viking I/C, by the way, is that it managed to provide 700 MW on a dipole, which was intended to be offline for maintenance.

Below is the Elexon chart for generation and I/C supply during yesterday:

Annoyingly, they don’t seem to have an option to show which fuel categories are which! But I have filtered out below everything except for Biomass, CCGT, Nuclear and Wind, in that order. (I/Cs at 5.30pm were supplying 6.3 GW, Pumped Storage 1.7 GW, OCGT 0.9 GW and Others 3.8 GW).

With Biomass and Nuclear running flat out, CCGT supplied 24.2 GW at that time. Wind ran at 2.6 GW. It needs to be pointed out that wind has often fallen to less than 1 GW in winter.

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!