Failure on National Grid network affects train services and road users
Large parts of England and Wales have been left without electricity following a major power cut, electricity network operators have said, with a serious impact reported on rail and road services, including city traffic lights.
Passengers were shut out of some of the country’s busiest train stations during the Friday evening rush hour, while hundreds of thousands of homes were left without electricity after what the National Grid described as a problem with two generators.
The British Transport police said officers were asked to help as services on the east coast mainline were suspended, with many customers being advised not to travel; and London’s Euston station, the southern hub for the west coast mainline, was closed because of “exceptionally high passenger numbers”. The outage was reportedly also affecting other rail services and traffic lights.
Shortly before 6.30pm, a National Grid spokesperson said the generator issues had caused “loss of power in selected UK areas”. The spokesperson said the issue was “now resolved” and the system had returned to normal.
About 500,000 customers in Wales, south-west England and the Midlands were affected and 300,000 customers in south-east England were left without power, the local distributors said. A further 110,000 in Yorkshire and north-east England were affected, alongside about 26,000 in north-west England, according to the electricity distributors in those areas.
There won’t be at the moment – all lines are blocked between London and Welwyn. Will update you as soon as I can.
-ZG
— Hull Trains (@Hull_Trains) August 9, 2019
Enappsys, an energy consultancy, said the blackout may have been caused by the unexpected shutdowns of the Hornsea offshore wind farm, which is owned by the Danish wind farm company Orsted, and the Little Barford gas-fired power plant, owned by German utility giant RWE.
National Grid data showed both of the generators dropped from the grid at around the same time. The twin outages caused a sudden loss of frequency of the electricity grid, to below 49Hz, which would have caused certain parts of the network to disconnect automatically, causing the power cuts.
https://twitter.com/MarisaOrRisa/status/1159870080324423680
⚠️ #TLUpdates – Trains are currently at a stand between Farringdon & Bedford.
This is having a wider impact to services across the whole network. More information once we have it.
Full details, service updates, travel advice & ticket acceptance ℹ️👇https://t.co/iYMraBkjSy
— Thameslink (@TLRailUK) August 9, 2019
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As we ‘transition to zero carbon’ all electric everything, expect more of the same.. much more.
Welcome to the new ‘green’ all electric world !
yes, electric transport is all about making everyone totally reliant on central control. Removing our ability for autonomous movement. In case of any serious civil unrest, they just throw a switch and everyone stops moving. Totalitarian control is the aim, “green” is the blue pill they give everyone to swallow.
Im really amazed at so many trains going electric, even in Aus. last time i used them they were diesel and kept going when power went out;-)
might be time to devolve back for reliable transport for people to get to their cold dark homes at least
hmm how many “smart:(stupid) appliances have hissyfits when powers down?
Transportation is the LARGEST user of energy.
Here in the UK they tend to run both diesel and electric in the same track so that when the power fails the electric trains block the track and the diesels cannot run either.
What I have noticed in the UK in recent years some rail services run a “top and tail” set meaning two locomotives, a bit like the 1970’s HST 125 sets, and in some cases a diesel-electric one end and an all electric at the other.
When we had central heating put in I insisted on keeping one old gas fire which does not depend on electricity like the gas boiler. I also have one usable open fire and a cupboard full of candles: I have memories of the power cuts of the three-day week.
News flash: UK powers into the lead with Industrial Devolution. Read all about it!
Did the offshore wind farm closed down because it was too windy?
Have to guess it did
its a ringer for the Sth Aus system fails a while back;-)
guess intending immigrants to Aus just got some practice;-)
they’ll feel right at home when OUR grids all cascade fail epically this summer.
No. It looks as though its entire output was suddenly lost because of a fault on the transmission line to shore or the connections and transformers at either end. That is always going to be a risk when you are 120km/75 miles offshore. Indications are the power lost was of the order of 850GW, which is about 70% of nominal capacity of 1.2GW. So wind was well within operational limits.
Buy an electric car (coal fired), save the planet……..
This gave me the mental image of a steam punk car spewing fumes from a coal fired generator that supplied electricity to the electric motors on the wheels! Love it!
This is how many “diesel” trains operate.
I had just met one of my sons when this happened. We had been talking about how toxic to your career being labelled a “Climate Change Denier” can be. How can we ever face reality with this prejudice is so pervasive?
The late great Christopher Booker warned about this in a book ten years ago. The Real Global Warming Disaster.
… and if visiting the UK bring your own torch
To add to the fun, lightning strikes at Retford. https://www.lincolnshirelive.co.uk/news/local-news/lightning-strikes-stop-trains-between-3195634
Mind the gap.
I am working in Tanzania this last month. We have had power outages about twice per week. The people here are hoping their sources and grid are improving and will reach up to European standards of reliability. This is an important economic issue.
Sadly, it seems that the Tanzanian and European standards are indeed converging, but with the European descending to the Tanzanian. And likely to get worse, as often the wind does not blow, or blows too hard, and the sun does not shine half of the day.
I stayed in TZ from 1998 to 2005 as an Development Worker / Educator. We were grid connected but had also an electicity generator, a solar heater, a small PV set, a cooking stove with heat exchanger and a 200 liter hot water tank connected. Also some open fire places in our bedrooms. If everything failed we had also one petrol run electricity genrator. Somehow cheap for us Europeans but not affordable for normal income Tanzanians.
This has nothing to do with the UK government’s over-reliance on renewable energy, honest.
Alas, such irony is lost on true believers.
Its mid summer, where the network isnt even under high stress.
Wait till a winter ‘cold snap’ or a longer period.
As always you can fiddle with the voltage but dont mess with grid frequency
Not necessarily. With a delicious irony, chances of grid failure are higher in summer because the demand is lower and so unreliable generation makes up a higher proportion. The costs of keeping our grid going have been rising steadily as the generation gets more unreliable.
I might well dispute their claimed time of failure as being 6.30pm. As I arrived at the platform for my train home at 5pm a train on the other platform was stopped due to a fault. This then expanded to be a power grid failure from that station northwards. Just over an hour later I was finally leaving London from another station on a diesel powered service.
You can’t mess with the frequency per se. When the frequency of a generator decreases, that means it’s becoming bogged down and is turning slower. link That’s a big problem. All the generators on the grid have to be running in lock step. It’s called synchronous.
AC is when the voltage starts at zero, increases to a maximum, decreases back to zero, continues decreasing to a maximum negative voltage, and increases to zero again, and so forth. All the generators have to be doing that at exactly the same time. That’s called the phase. If a generator gets out of sync, it can start sucking power out of the grid and would lead to its destruction if it didn’t automatically disconnect.
Frequency is treated like some kind of holy grail. The thing is that solar PV, as well as high voltage DC transmission lines, uses electronic inverters to make the AC. They can have the correct frequency and phase all the time. That solves one problem but it deprives the grid operator of a useful signal about how well the inverter is able to keep up with the demand. Windmills have a weirder set of problems. link
Take a look at https://www.kiwithinker.com/2017/07/analysis-of-an-under-frequency-event/
I might believe that voltage can be measured locally and maintained locally. I am not so sure about phase. That would require some kind of communication link between inverters that would itself also be vulnerable.
“If a generator gets out of sync…” it does not draw power from the grid ( called motoring), instead it instantly tries to get back into sync. Depending on the inertia of the generator it either torques itself or tears itself apart, spectacularly. That’s is why safety trips are part of the generator control system. Motoring generators are actually in sync (acting as a synchronous motor), a technique sometimes used for power factor correction.
A generator out of sync usually happens when trying to tie in to the grid manually and missing the mark, a very expensive screwup that can result in buying a new generator.
Electronics people and electrical people sometimes find themselves talking different languages. Anyway, we both agree on the consequences.
A long (long) time ago, I was doing an electrical engineering course. The lecturer was explaining how a generator was bought up to speed and the phase adjusted, in those days by three bulbs connected across each phase, between the grid and the generator.
The speed and phase adjusted until all three bulbs were out, then the big switch thrown to connect the generator into the system.
He was present at the commissioning of a new generator. Company bigwigs were there, and the turbines fired up to spin up the generator. The person doing the fine tuning of the phasing had done this many times before, but didn’t pay enough attention. Two of the phases has been swapped when the generator was installed.
The big switch was thrown, and the nice, new, expensive, generator tore its mounting bolts out of its concrete bed, and disappeared through a large hole in the generator shed roof.
The electric grid has built in synchronization for frequency, phase, and voltage. They have to be kept steady within ~.5%. The larger generating plants normally do this task. Very small plants, power inverters, wind power inverters all are designed to adjust according to current frequency/phase/voltage within the +/- .5% range.
If a large power source shuts down abruptly the other generators start to fail in a cascade, depending on how much resiliency they have and whether there is enough electricity available to satisfy demand.
Apparently the operators didn’t or couldn’t or weren’t allowed to do some sort of “soft” fail where critical supplies- hospitals, trains(in this case) , traffic control, airport lights, and other things required for safety were the last to fail.
Inverters than maintain a constant frequency are unhelpful in a grid. They must follow the grid frequency as best they can, otherwise they will get out of phase and disrupt the grid. Consider cos(50t)+cos(49.9t) to see the effect.
What happens with PV when there is an imbalance between supply and demand is that voltage takes the first hit. Often, in residential locations the problem is that supply greatly exceeds demand in the middle of the day when most are out at work and the voltage rises, which can burn out appliances. The extra energy has to be dissipated!
Solar, by putting excess power into the grid, increases voltage in the system. This increases consumer cost, and shortens appliance life. Conversely, the inverters cut the panels from the grid at 253 volts, and the homeowner loses potential revenue at peak producing hours. Lose-lose-lose
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-08/high-voltage-fuelling-increased-electricity-consumption/10460212
@commieBob, very much agree as regards the language issues across specialities, certain words can have VERY specific meanings which are very different from those used by other related specialities. They are often unrelated to common usage, increasing the confusion.
“we are not trying to be obscure, it just seems that way when we try to explain…”
Whatever Duker but in Oz we’ll certainly be looking forward to some of that missing heat coming down under-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/huge-snowfall-across-australian-resorts/ar-AAFAH0F
although the climate changers are a lot more worried about our peak summer demand with air-conditioning. They can rabbit on about the climate all they like but it’s weather that will find out their unreliables.
Kevin I clicked on your link at got a solar ad. So you’re joking…I hope….honest.
it must be the Russian GRU “hacking” the national grid , Pootun personally ordered this attack. Expel more diplomats, more sanctions on Russian “entities” …
No, the brexiteers are to blame. They must pay for the damages.
.
.
.
/sarc
Grig, Russians would rather sell more gas just to get control on our energy system.
What comes to hacking, they do hack. They did track Litvinenko and poison him, leaving a ‘card’ as well. Putin is bloodthirsty and has both agents and useful idiots at this side.
More that it relies on foreign owned companies to provide power.
That’s what the deflection stories are now trying to claim. Fortunately, I managed to research it before the data cover-up got under way – see below.
The UK will get more and more dysfunctional, the more they move to their target of 100% renewables (which is impossible.
Not wishing to make excuses but the UK target is carbon neutral by 2050. They intend to plant lots of trees, have lots of wind turbines and solar and then start to panic, frack and build lots more nuclear. Peak Oil should be the real fear, but when that is is very hush-hush.
This is just one of those small things that can happen. It could just as well have been a nuclear power station that fell out, so in this case I would not put too much into this event.
However, it is interesting to compare the chaos this caused, compared to the almost one week long total blackout in southern Sweden and Denmark back in the mid 70’s. Back then it was caused by a high voltage line in Sweden hitting a tree top, thus propagating cut off within half an hour from Sweden to the Danish/German border in Jutland. By getting the then worlds largest diesel north of Copenhagen started (with stored compressed air), it was possible to get stable voltage and frequency to synchronize all the rest of the generators, which were almost solely coal fired with Polish coal.
Carl F-H
Similar things have happened with Ontario Hydro generators. My father was an engineer at OH in the ’50’s when such a failure occurred across the province. The cause was interesting: a lack of braking on the generators.
It started with two units at one station that started cycling up and down in opposition to each other. Stability is controlled by changing the pitch angle of the blades which balances the load with the frequency. The issue was the delay between the detected problem (mismatch) and the reaction time of the blade change mechanism and the rotating mass. It could not react quickly enough due to the absence of brakes – a money-saving choice made when specifying the bearings, apparently. As the up-and-down of the pair reacting in opposite directions got out of synch, the first pair started another pair of generators doing the same thing in the same station. Before long the entire station was ramping up and down in opposition to another station. The whole grid started experiencing a frequency cycle with the stations, which used the frequency on the grid to set their own generators in alignment, each leaping up and down trying to match the phase of the oscillating grid.
The whole thing collapsed. Everyone disconnected everything. The next problem was the whole grid had never been off since it was built. No one knew how to begin. Using the (battery-powered) phone system, calls bounced around with the eventual decision being to start the oldest station first. They were then brought on line in the order they were built, using their respective original phase alignment protocols. As the available total power increased, the loads were connected.
This type of problem exists in the solar and wind turbine sectors which depend on a signal from the grid to control the inverters. It is no mean feat to start a grid with hundreds of sources, each of which needs “direction”.
Over 50% of the electricity had been coming from asynchronous generators (wind), and so the grid was in a very precarious state and was very vulnerable to any large generator falling over.
Perhaps our latest energy minister (whoever the current incumbent is) ought to be made aware of this and should be issuing warnings to all consumers that we have entered a new era of blackouts.
All those previous energy ministers were correct when they said that blackouts would not be occurring on their watch – they kept on kicking the can down the road for the next energy minister to deal with.
Buy home generator futures.
And if any here would like to brush up on synchronous vs asynchronous generation, governor control vs Wind following, and how frequency and power dynamic works, you might like to look at https://www.kiwithinker.com/2017/04/electric-power-system-stability/
https://reneweconomy.com.au/ge-grids-dont-need-rely-synchronous-generation-89161/
Then, there is this.
Perhaps the operators, quite reasonably, “game” the system. There was a a lot of wind Thursday and Friday as a storm went up the West side of the British Isles. On Friday it was less windy. I’m guessing that the windmill operators were cashing in on Friday, by supplying 10GW. I think this is the highest sustained figure achieved for UK wind, by a wide margin:it’s typically 5GW. For the last 36 hours, the power supplied by wind exceeded that supplied by gas: possibly the first time this has ever happened “since records began”. I guess that operators were cashing in on the subsidies offered by meeting the average demand and the grid was now over half dependent on the asynchronous (i.e. wind) generators. Or perhaps the National Grid was “stress testing” by seeing what would happen if over half the demand was met by wind.
https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
PS: A quick look at the National Grid Status shows that wind is still (10am, 10/Aug/2019) exceeding gas because of a combination of the receding storm and the low demand on Saturday. Notice how on Thursday the wind contribution dropped to zero, presumably because the windmills had to be feathered in the high wind. Thursday was very windy with severe weather warnings and many outdoor events cancelled.
Thanks Suffolk Boy. That does help explain it. If synchronous generation was at half, then momentum also would be about half, therefore for a given power deficit the result would be twice the rate of frequency decline, giving half the time to respond. And as only half the machines can respond (the synchronised governor controlled ones) they each have twice the job to do. They would be struggling with a deficit so large. So with only half the machines able to respond, and half the time to do it in, it is no wonder that under frequency shedding actuated.
No the wind dropped on Thursday.
https://www.weatheronline.co.uk/weather/maps/current?LANG=en&DATE=1565348400&CONT=ukuk&LAND=UK&KEY=UK&SORT=2&UD=0&INT=06&TYP=windspitze_km_h&ART=karte&RUBRIK=akt&R=310&CEL=C&SI=mph
Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is Andrea Leadsom. I think she’s a sceptic.
We call people such as her, realists.
It’s interesting that we aren’t told what has happened…
A bit like WW2, when you weren’t told which cities had been bombed.. .
The news said something on the lines of “2 power stations went offline simultaneously “ I was wondering, whether wind power had a role in this, as we’ve very strong winds and thus a big chunk of our power from this source.
It does – one of the plants to fail was a wind farm.
This UK power cut has similarities with the South Australia one – high winds causing wind generated electricity to surge before being suddenly cut off when winds got too high.
Welcome to the future of renewables supplying too high a percentage of the grid with asynchronous electricity. The new definition of demand side management.
It’s been long predicted … as has been the press response which will be “this had nothing at all to do with us pushing wind”.
The key question: How many black outs will occur before even the media complains, and points out wind is not a good idea?
From the Australian power cut, the typical response is going to be “this shows how unreliable fossil fuels are” … but the fact is that May’s barmy politicians told fossil fuel generators that there was no future and so they’ve stopped investing in reliable plant.
This power cut was entirely due to the insane BIG-GREEN sponsored politicians
It’s not clear so far whether the loss of the Hornsea wind farm in the North Sea was a planned switch-off because the forecast progress of the storm was expected to make the windmills inoperable or was an abrupt loss. Presumably Little Barford gas-fired was fully functioning but could not make up the demand and automatically dropped out or could not be quickly re-connected. Sizewell nuclear would just be kept at constant output. At least it wasn’t a complete “black start”, as in South Australia. It’s not the lack of wind that is the problem around the British Isles that causes problems so much as the excess.
Notice the “Weekly Nuclear/Coal/CCGT/Wind” for Thursday, which is when the increasing wind was mostly over the south-west of the UK, before tracking North-East into the North Sea. Fortunately the events didn’t occur at a time of particularly high demand.
https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
Doubtless Ofgem will thump the table, but it won’t alter the perception that the UK power system is now very fragile and vulnerable to storms.
Thanks for the link, informative.
There was general reduction in wind production throughout Thursday but nothing big enough to stand out as a sudden grid level failure. Gas took up the slack.
Had the enviro loonies not shut down the large modern clean coal plant that was under construction in Kingsnorth Kent , this probably would not have happened.
That storm hit France, Brittany, Alsace, hard. Funny, it does not appear to have a popular name. Anyway it would be good to see if the continent weathered such windiness, and if so ,why.
Could it be that with all Macron’s greenie talk, nuclear saved France?
Brexit should not mean nuclear exit!
Success!!
We have successfully decarbonised a large Western economy 100% for a few hours. Welcome to the future…
Jazz hands!
I am glad the outages hit London might make people think about reliable supply. But what surprises me is that no British company owns those generators. I though renewables were going to make supply more robust.
If only planners had listened to our moral guardians and built more windmills and solar panels (I believe Solyndra had two or three going spare) then this could have all been avoided.
Lucky national demand was low. If it had been winter? I fear for my mythical granny in her unheated room on a dark cold windless night.
That’ll be me.
Paradoxically in winter we might have been better off, because they would have been running most of the reliable CCGT capacity to meet the much higher level of demand. Even if a similar amount of generation had been lost, higher inertia would have slowed the frequency decline and allowed more time for other generators to pick up the slack. Dinorwig did its bit, but it takes 12 seconds to get up to speed – seconds it didn’t have, aside from being in the wrong place to make up the shortfall without the grid re-routing supplies which can cause problems of its own.
We are experiencing some minor technical difficulties with the national power grid just at present so please rely on your backup generators until normal power is restored. Assuming you are in possession of the appropriate quantity of carbon credits of course.
The BBC blames every bad impact of weather on Global Warming.
Strangely, this bad impact of high wind is not blamed on anything.
They must know they are misleading the public.
Oddly , this major event is already gone from the guardian front page. More interested in promoting revolt in HK than the failure of basic infrastructure in the UK.
What is very clear is that people will not put up with this. The increased dependency of transport infrastructure on electricity makes it fatally sensitive to outages.
Yesterday was quite a windy day and of course not all wind farms can cope well with strong winds. I wonder if this explains the widespread nature of the outages?
The widespread nature with a non-obvious pattern is probably load-shedding by frequency-sensitive relays that all fire at different values, either set so or because of the natural error band in setting/activating. The frequency dropped to 48.889Hz at 15:53:45 UTC (15 sec time resolution). The 1 second data might be even more interesting when we get to see it (currently the public archive only goes to April).
Unstable Grid with minimal reliable backup. Thanks to the loony greens. Well done, ‘saving the planet’ twits.
This is very, very unusual for the UK power network.
Note that latest information shows the Barford gas gen plant went out first.
Not quite. The gas plant went to idle first, then Hornsea went off line, and the gas plant then went off line trying to ramp up.
It is a guess at this point, but from the noise just before the crash, from the wind industry, they were perhaps trying to set a record for wind production; hence the idling of the gas plant.
Like the Titanic trying to set a speed record across the Atlantic?
Reminds me of Chernobyl. They were testing their diesel back-up generator.
The Barford gas generator cut out because it’s contract dictated that it must do so when wind generation which has precedence was available.
The wind farm according to a spokesperson cut out entirely in accordance with it’s operating parameters, but which parameter was not stated.
Either a sudden drop in wind caused an involuntary cessation of production or excessive wind speeds caused an immediate shut down to to prevent damage to the turbines.
The politicians against all sane advice have opened Pandora’s box. Fortunately this first manifestation was limited in it’s effect, subsequent blackouts will result in riots in the cities as their entitled inhabitants are brought face to face with the consequences of their ignorant bellowing to save the planet.
That turns out not to be true. It seems the report was the result of a Bloomberg journalist pressing RWE’s German head of PR for information and an internal failure to communicate with someone who really knew what was happening in the UK, but instead rang someone who knew something about the power station’s contract.
I thought you would do that–defend wind and solar as having nothing appreciable to do with the blackout. Read the posts earlier on this thread, and you might learn something of why “renewables” are not well suited to grid usage beyond a certain point of penetration.
“learn something of why “renewables” are not well suited to grid usage beyond a certain point of penetration.”
Yes, and the UK looks to be getting close to that point.
A few well-timed blackouts (doing minimal damage) might wake up the politicians to the fact that they have a problem on their hands and the path they are following of increasing the use of windmills and industrial solar is making things worse, not better.
They will probably have to learn the hard way. Let’s hope it’s not too hard on the population.
It is only unusual because for the first time we have too much asynchronous wind and not enough synchronous generation connected to the grid.
There is strong evidence to suggest that Hornsea lied by 7.5 minutes in reporting the timing of its outage: it was almost certainly the first to go. See my main post below.
“Note that latest information shows the Barford gas gen plant went out first.”
I would have bet money that you or one of the other “Defenders of the Windmill” would say that! And here you are. 🙂
This UK power cut has similarities with the South Australia one – high winds causing wind generated electricity to surge before being suddenly cut off when winds got too high.
Slightly different as in SA pylons collapsed under the load leading to a cascade effect. Not sure any power generation type would have fared less IMO.
True but now the pylon dust has settled the Australian Energy Regulator is taking four wind farms to Court-
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/three-years-on-from-the-south-australia-blackout-the-dangers-of-our-rush-to-renewables-are-even-clearer-20190807-p52esi.html
Gosh! Just read some of the comments…
One poster by the name of “Thucydides” (Ancient Greek science historian) categorically states that CO2 at ~410ppm/v is way too high. Others who post on climate related articles at the SMH also state that CO2 *MUST* drop back to between 180 – 280ppm/v to save the climate/planet. Others claim more CO2 does not lead to better plant growth. Others have stated that we breathe only O2 from the air, forgetting the air contains mostly N2.
Not sure where these people get their information from.
The AEMO report on the SA outage, said the biggest problem is that the ratio of dispatchable energy to demand, needs to be MORE than 1.
In other words, if there had been enough dispatchable energy (coal, gas), then the black out would been avoided.
Note how Wind/Solar figure into that calculation: It is assumed to be zero.
You need to read up on what actually happened in SA. It was faulty settings on wind farm control systems that caused the blackout.
Wrong Patrick. Yes, 2-3 pylons/lines failed a couple of seconds before the wind generators shut down, but when you look at where these pylons were located, you quickly realise that they weren’t on the main lines to Adelaide. It was the faulty low-speed settings on the wind generators that caused them to shut down prematurely, and there was insufficient alternative energy, South Australia having blown up its main coal power station.
I stand corrected. As I am sure you are aware, Aussie media leaves a lot of information out of events like this leaving out facts and the truth. Thanks.
Shortly after the blackout occurred, there was a concerted effort by the South Australian state premier and the renewables companies and their supporters to deflect the problem away from the wind generator failures. This misdirection is still occurring today. The turbine shutdown wind speeds were set too low – I believe around 50 mph. In any case, the reliance on too much energy from wind without sufficient baseload power caused a major blackout, and that part seems to resonate with what’s happened in the UK.
Indeed!
Clearly the media slipped up reporting it was a wind farm suddenly going offline that precipitated the failure, quickly followed by a conventional station. It will be interesting how the eco-idiots spin their way out of this one. The BBC actually reporting a wind farm failure – someone didn’t do their editing job there it seems. There will be some internal discussions no doubt.
Just more “Extinction rebellion”, hilarious what happens when you actually take them at their word.
A little “Extinction” of the lights, a log jam of ‘lectric trains requiring a reboot because the poor darling singe-point-of-failure onboard computers can’t cope with something unexpected, the Victoria line OUT, only for a few hours and you will see the rebellion pretty fast!
New name “infinitely renewable-power-cuts”.
Where is GRIFF when we need him to pipe up?
A few years ago when, LMAO, snow caused chaos on Britain’s rain network, they engaged the services of a steam engine. An A4 4-6-2, burning coal!
It was “Tornado” a Peppercorn A1 Pacific locomotive. About 100 people were offered free seats, according to Mark Allatt, chairman of The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust – the charity which completed the locomotive as the 50th A1 in 2008.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/8428097.stm
Thanks for that. I was thinking it was a Pacific class but I knew it’s wheel arrangement and that it was a new engine not a restored one.
Well, that just shows up what people who know about power generation have been telling us for decades – wind power simply isn’t reliable enough to generate the “base load” that an industrial civilization requires. It could be even worse if it happened in the middle of winter.
The idiot politicians of the UK, though, would rather let civilization collapse than try to fix the problem. With their fondness for Extinction Rebellion and their non-existent “climate crisis,” they have all gone to the extreme green lunatic fringe.
Time for some enterprising group to grab the nettle, and come out uncompromisingly in favour of our industrial civilization, and against the green agenda and its pushers like the UN and the EU. I wonder if the Brexit Party has the balls to go that way?
I believe Nigel Farage is sceptical about AGW but I don’t know whether it’s Brexit Party policy.
Not so “sustainable” now.
That idiot ex-Prime Minister Theresa May declared we must all be de-carbonized by 2050. The bill? A mere £1.5 Trillion.
The climate change industry is aiming for absolute control over absolutely everything we do from how we move around to how we eat and keep warm, and so many people are taken in by it. I would not care and would be happy to leave these gullible fools to their delusions but it is costing us all a fortune and those who don’t believe the myth of climate change are not allowed to whisper their views on the most popular public forums; they are shut down by those who cannot and will not debate because they cannot back up what they say. Anyone who has bothered to read the Paris Climate Change Accord can see that it is not worth the paper it is written on. If more people read it, especially the “Extinction Rebellion” idiots, (they might need to have it explained to them), we could consign the whole damned farce to history and get on with our lives.
“The climate change industry is aiming for absolute control over absolutely everything”.
Quite Sasha, it’s all a power play.
I think the bill is likely to turn out to be a multiple of £1.5 trillion if we ever go through with it. It would probably take £2 trillion just to raise insulation standards of the housing stock (almost enough to rebuild it completely). Of course the economic consequences would also be disastrous. Wasting money on that scale reduces economic productivity and real incomes, and destroys competitiveness in international trade. However, if you have no income you can’t afford the imports of things you no longer produce.
“Not so “sustainable” now.”
LOL! Good one! 🙂