On Wednesday 8th January, the UK experienced a not unusual weather event in the evening which included low wind speeds and cold temperatures. I.e. the wind wasn’t blowing and the sun wasn’t shining.

Unfortunately,  our national energy infrastructure was poorly positioned to manage these conditions. As a result the National  Electricity Systems Operator (NESO) had to issue its first Electricity Margin Notice (EMN) of the winter. Kathryn Porter covered this in her article Blackouts near miss in tightest day in GB electricity market since 2011 where she stated:

Yesterday saw a blackout near miss in what turned out to be the tightest day the GB electricity market has seen since 2011. Wind power was 2.5 GW through the evening peak, solar was (obviously) zero and there were significant interconnector outages leaving expected capacity at just 5.7 GW. Had just one large power station tripped this evening, demand control would have been a real prospect.

She explained that:

An Electricity Market Notice (“EMN”) is issued when the spare capacity does not cover the contingency NESO has decided is necessary.

David Turver, another analyst, analysed what happened to the system margin (headroom of gas supply available) during this time in his article Fake It Until You Break It. The following diagram shows what happened during this event:

The red line “Loss of Load Probability” went up to 29% at one point, and as a result operators scrambled to keep the lights on at any price. Rye House Power Station offered and was accepted, a price of £4,000/MWhbut as the requirement went up the price increased to £5,500/MWh. Prior to NetZero policies, the wholesale price of gas was no more than £50/MWh and this is approximately what we would be paying today in a deregulated energy market. We hope that Mr Miliband will take this as a wake-up call, as to ignore this would be incredibly irresponsible given his position as head of the NESO.

We know the impact of high prices on the poorest, particularly pensioners, many of whom will die this winter as a result of this and the impact of withdrawing the winter fuel heating allowance in a very sudden, clumsy way.

This isn’t just an isolated winter event. NetZero policy fundamentally depends on foreign imports to cover these shortfalls. Extra supplies from abroad mainly come from gas and nuclear and gas at home. However, as the proportion of renewable energy is increased it becomes less efficient to operate our own gas fired power stations. This is because they will be reduced to supporting peak load requirements only. The best way to understand this is to imagine having to drive your car around at 5 mph and occasionally have to do short bursts of 70mph. This is a basic engineering reality.

Of course, if mainland Europe were to enact the same policies, then there would be limited spare capacity. If everyone suffers shortfalls there would be increasing demand on that limited supply with resultant price gouging as described earlier. There simply is no magic bullet.

Add to this the fact that we apparently only have a week’s worth of stored gas available, and we have to accept that our energy infrastructure is on its knees.