There a several major power grids around the world that have “greened” themselves to teetering on the brink of collapse, such as California and South Australia, the UK, and soon to be followed by New York State.
There is a post about the UK.
Seeing a stories, such as this the last few days:
Britain’s National Grid issues warning for electricity system tightness on Friday
By Reuters Staff
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s National Grid issued an electricity margin notice (EMN) for 4.00-7.00 p.m. (1600-1900 GMT) on Friday, asking generators if they can make more power available.
The grid operator said there is a system margin shortfall of 1157 megawatts compared with the amount it would like to be available.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-electricity/britains-national-grid-issues-warning-for-electricity-system-tightness-on-friday-idUSKBN29D0SF
Or social media posts:
Of course there’s still articles like this:
UK energy supply heading for greenest year on record, says National Grid
Ben Chapman 30/12/2020
The UK’s energy supply is heading for its greenest year ever as record-breaking wind power generation helped to cut emissions, data from National Grid shows.
The amount of carbon emissions produced for each unit of electricity – the carbon intensity – plunged 60 per cent between 2013 and 2019 as new renewable capacity has come online while coal-fired power stations have been decommissioned.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/uk-energy-supply-heading-for-greenest-year-on-record-says-national-grid/ar-BB1ck68S
This is a request for our British readers.
Enlighten the readers across the pond.
Has the weather been unusual?
Is much worse expected to come?
How likely is it that the current steps being taken will prevent blackouts?
How much worse is it likely to get in the next year, three, or five?
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In Derby East Midlands of England it’s been a fairly typical winter, a bit colder that the last few years. Some rain, some freezing fog, overcast days. The typical high pressure weather I remember from earlier years of clear sunny days where temperatures in the shade remained below freezing and cold nights, double figures below zero have been missing, probably a good thing. Not had more than a couple of light dustings of snow.
Wind and Solar haven’t been putting out schist…
https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent
This is the other site –
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
I’m south of London, close by the A23, Brighton Road, and inside the M25 Orbital
CarparkMotorway.We had freezing fog overnight last night [9th-10th].
Some extraordinarily pretty sights on trees and hedges.
Some weak Sun this afternoon.
But temperature-wise, nothing exceptional.
It’s January.
It gets cold, sometimes.
We had a flurry or three of snow a couple of days ago, but it melted fairly quickly.
Warmer weather coming tomorrow, I gather. Perhaps some rain late tomorrow.
Usual winter high, with little wind [and of course precious little sunlight].
Unreliables don’t cut it here – even before the Blond Buffoon gets us all in golf-buggies, sending demand shooting up. Even if supply won’t match it without Gas and Nukes.
But I expect to be dead before this comes to pass.
Cheers – and be safe,
Auto
weather normal – cold and dry. has been very wet. forecast mixed, Its Jan – anything can happen. Gridwatch shows coal power back on, max daily request at the time of the alert in the article was 47 – spot on the same as last year. No great drama to see here in the short term, and dont beleive the IC bs. Long term – oh yes, the govt is promising us no travel (electric cars but no new nuclear) and dead pensioners (fuel poverty) – kind of like long term covid. Hopefully people will wake up before its too late.
Edit – sorry, South england, middle, 12 miles from coast.
The following website is a handy source of “official” information on UK electricity supply for those interested. It’s called the Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service (BMRS):
http://www.bmreports.com
If you go to the “Transmission” tab, you will see the link to access the latest system warnings. At the time of writing this comment, the system warning mentioned in the main post above (and end of the warning) are still visible.
Another interesting link under “Transmission” tab is the labelled “Loss of load probability (LOLP) and derated margin”. When this opens, it will show you the latest LOLP and margin forecasts.
You can use the “historic” tab to access past LOLP and margin forecasts. Go into this tab and select the date 2021-01-08 and go down to the row where SP is 36 (this is half hour beginning 18:00 on 8th January 2021). LOLP was 0.126, and system margin was 885MW. That was a close shave. One or two big units coming offline could have pushed the UK into rota disconnections over the evening peal. That would have been popular with the voters!
Because there was a system warning, all of the generating capacity would have been operating at full tilt, and it is likely that all demand side response would have been utilised.
If the same thing happens next year, the UK could be in a pickle. The Hunterston nuclear power station (nearly 1 GW) is due to close, and there is talk of another couple of GW of coal-fired capacity closing soon. Watch out for announcements of coal fired power units being kept alive in the “strategic balancing reserve”.
Wind “Turbines” like the ones in the illustration above produce an advertised 2.5 – 3.0 MW
A short search finds Caterpillar 2750 KW (2.7 MW) diesel generators for about $500,000
What I really don’t know is the actual installed cost of a 2.7 MW Wind “Turbine” [$____] fill in the blank. After all the subsidies, tax breaks and bullshit $1 million $2 million or more, I’ve never gotten a good answer.
Maybe this will help:
https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/365-wind-power-economics-rhetoric-and-reality
It is based on analysing wind farm company accounts
Thanks for the link, Using figure 1, it looks like an on shore 3 MW Wind “Turbine” is close to $6 Million in actual cost. Double that for off shore.
Treble. IIRC the ones in the North sea were about £4bn/GW nameplate
With a capacity factor of 40% at best and a lifetime of 20 years, that’s around £500m per MW/year
Contrast Hinkley point at £20bn for 60 years life and 3.2GW, at 80% capacity factor that £160m per MW/yr . And that power station was supposed to cost less than half that.
IIRC = If I Remember Correctly. It’s a real pain to have to look up all the acronyms that people use because they think it makes them look smart. It doesn’t. But thanks for the reply.
No the weather has not been unusual
London area
Mid Nottinghamshire. Very rural
The local peasant reckoned, and I’d agree, that this autumn was extremely gloomy. No sun
Didn’t rain a lot but there was no ‘drying’
A lot like Cumbria as I was always used to, constant damp.
In my garden temp-wise
Oct ’20 was 1.1 C warmer than Oct ’19
Nov ’20 was 2.5 C warmer than Nov ’19
Dec ’20 was 0.5 C cooler than Dec ’19
So far in January
First week Jan ’21 was 6.6 C cooler than Jan ’20
Did have a blackout here, but caused by the birds dancing on the wires.
Dancing is good for you, can’t begrudge them that.
Can begrudge our haha leaders tho
Not very many years ago, UK consumption nudged 60GW and No Problemo
Now it barely passes 40G and see what we have. sigh
I can see a coupla coal burners from here. West Burton chugging away (I think) and also the one that recently closed for good. It was a goody as well 🙁
Re the French Inter-connector.
Weren’t we reading here that it was ‘A Nice Little Earner’ for the UK – that Les Froggies voule-vood our (renewable) elektrikery more than we wanted their nukes
But Brexit reveals that not only have we given that away, but also our fisheries – in return for French nuclear grunt!!
Words fail (Not completely, more like unprintable)
None of this makes sense
My memory is a little foggy on this: was it Henry II who forbade the peasants to cut wood to heat their hovels? Just askin’, because it was kind of chilly back then, wasn’t it?
So if the current set of peasants can’t use wood or coal or whatever to heat their homes and cook, how does Boris the Blatherskite expect them to survive what appears to be a cold and snowy winter in Europe?
The logic escapes me completely.
Ooops! Meant to include UK in that Europe question. My bad.
Well, in Henry II’s defense – it was the Medieval Warm Period then.
Yeah, but he was more interested in having wood for his own needs and keeping the peasants cold and hungry by not letting them hunt for game or cut down any of HIS trees. They had to make do on what they could scrounge and catch without a todo, and on what they could find in the way of “fallen” wood, e.g., deadfalls and broken branches. Even then, they could be punished for it if they were caught at it.
Baby, it’s cold inside.
There will be more snow in the British Isles. Stay warm.
The ozone blockage over the Bering Strait bursts a polar vortex in the lower stratosphere.
Yes ren
lts looking like there could be a “Arctic Blast” spell of weather hitting the UK around 17th to 20th Jan.One to watch to see how it plays out.
Better take a look at the animation below.
http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/webAnims/tpw_nrl_colors/europe/mimictpw_europe_latest.gif
With this weather front the snow will be largely confined to the northern hills. As the warm air from the mid Atlantic will be blocked from going up into the Arctic and will then be forced to flow over the UK instead. For really cold “Arctic blast” weather here in the UK we need a Greenland block setting up. The current jet stream forecast is suggesting that this could happen between the 17th to 20th of Jan.
England, North East coast, cold, but not exceptional. Fairly windy now, but was calm earlier. Sunny earlier today after cloud and rain the last few days, but not bright enough to melt the ice. Will it be rolling blackouts, or will it be some of the hidden features on smart meters being activated?
Shropshire has been colder than the last few years, hardly above freezing for the past two weeks. We had -6 two days ago until mid morning and it did not go above -2. Little wind and not a lot of sun. Freezing fog for several mornings.
To watch UK power supplies Google Gridwatch Templar.
JF
‘Heartbreak’ of near perfect ski conditions and empty lockdown slopes in Scotlandhttps://www.scotsman.com/news/uk-news/heartbreak-near-perfect-ski-conditions-and-empty-lockdown-slopes-scotland-3090077?itm_source=parsely-api
Do we have Winter U.K. Met.figures for 1947 and 62/3? Seems to me that these are black swans waiting in the wings.
I recall driving from Liverpool to Southampton in late March 1963 with snow piled 10 ft high by the side of much of the roads.
I remember doing that during the recent beast from the East and in the December to remember the farmers were putting snow ploughs on their tractors to keep the back roads of Lincolnshire clear not sure how I ended up in front of them.
The SST of doom. Frost has stayed on the ground all day in Lincolnshire at around freezing because of weak sun.
https://apps.ecmwf.int/webapps/opencharts/products/w_sst?area=North%20West%20Europe&base_time=202101091200&level=sst&valid_time=202101241200
I remember the cold winters of the 60’s and 70’s in the UK, the 70’s we were also hit with power worker strikes so we had to resort to paraffin heaters and lanterns, fortunately then we had an open fire with a water heater in the back so we were mostly OK for hot water and our fridge was gas powered.
How times have changed where the Govn’t wants everyone to be powered by electricity and smart meters. Only one reason for that.
I was going to say Griff will be along soon claiming how renewables are so wonderful but I see he is here spouting the usual rubbish.
The 8th produced some interesting behaviour. Gas demand totaled about 4.4TWh in the UK, with 0.92TWh going to fire CCGT and OCGT plants. Wind generation dipped below 1.2GW at one point, 5% of its capacity. Available generation was maxed out, with coal contributing 3GW much of the day, and CCGT around 23GW likewise. Imports were running as high as 900MW from Ireland, on top of 2GW from France and 1GW from Belgium, pretty much the maximum possible level of import. By mid afternoon, pumped storage started to ramp up over 1GW, reaching almost 2GW later during the demand peak. However, Ireland had to back off the exports to meet its own demand peak, which saw system prices rise to £2,750/MWh. Then two things happened almost simultaneously: Ireland stopped exporting entirely, and the storage at Dinorwig ran down to its minimum acceptable level (it has to retain sufficient in store for black start capability, but can store a total of 9.1GWh and generate at up to 1.7GW), so it had to stop generating. The result was a shortage at an unexpected time, and the system price was £4,000/MWh for the whole hour between 7 and 8 p.m., with considerable use of STOR diesel generators.
Running out of pumped storage was perhaps the most important message of the day.
See my several related posts starting here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/01/03/putting-a-lid-on-the-most-recent-climate-decade/#comment-3157141
No-one commented on the Stokes redefinition in the artcile .. “electricity system tightness”
In previous times we called it supply shortage but in the green new world you can’t use bad terms like “shortage”
Summary of the real as opposed to fake imaginary situation
Great Britain draws its power from a number of sources. Coal, nuclear, gas combined cycle plant, open cycle gas turbines, wood burning converted coal plant, a little hydro, some pumped hydro, three inter-connectors to mainland Europe and of course the renewable wind and solar power.
A summary and full historic data exists on my Gridwatch website.
In addition there is one tiny tidal power station a few CHP waste burning generators and a couple of batteries that contribute a few MW each….
The nuclear plant is due to close in a few years apart from Sizewell B.
All the coal plant is due to close and will not be replaced.
The government has committed to zero fossil by 2050 or whatever.Which presumably means the end of gas. Which is far and away the largest contributor to the UK grid.
How this plays out in the next decade will be in Britain a far more serious issue than Brexit, climate change and COVID19 combined. We are looking at the collapse of modern society, potentially, as the political targets cannot be met without a drastic and lethal drop in living standards.
What has happened recently, and I would have posted on it, but my posts are never published so I didn’t waste my time, is that several things have again come together to produce a mini crisis.
Those are the contributory factors. Without wind and solar power Britain did not really have enough capacity, especially with the loss of the Dutch inter-connector, and so system warnings were issued. These are requests – and in some cases directives – for non-essential load to get off the system, Some big users have special contracts for cheaper electricity if they will respond to these load shedding requests. The requests are also indicative of a call for anything that can be added to the grid to be added, until there is sufficient supply to meet demand, As this happens the spot price of electricity rises.
Coal and hydro responded by running as high as I have seen then in the last few years. Coal is limited in annual running hours, so a high wholesale price suits them fine. Reservoirs run out of water, so they made the best of recent rains.
The system price of electricity is normally between £40 and £90/MWh
For one period the system price rose to £1500/MWh and at the same time on the following day it was £4000/MWh a one hundred times increase in cost to the consumer.
Data for that, courtesy of BM reports. I don’t record those prices on my website. Perhaps I should.
Disaster was narrowly averted, but at a high cost. It can only get worse. There is more wind today and it’s less cold. And its Sunday. But the coal powers stations are staying on for now.
I have noticed some rubbish disinformation posted in the comments about grid frequency stability.
.
Here is a better explanation
The British and continental grids run at 50Hz, maintained to a very tight specification. They are separate however. The undersea inter-connectors run on DC, for reasons of efficiency of transmission. But the important thing to note is that these grids are all completely phase locked, It is simply not possible for a generator to ‘be on a different frequency’. It is not even really possible for them to be out of phase. Slight variations in phase are simply indicative of how much power the generators are putting on, or indeed drawing off, the grid. So that if for example a steam turbine fails, the generator wont stop, it will simply drop its phase back a little and become a motor running off the grid rather than a generator on it. Until it is disconnected.
Reconnecting a generator consists in running it up to frequency and then very very carefully watching the phase difference between the generator and the grid and when they are zero, throwing the switches and connecting it to the grid.
Frequency is important for two fundamental reasons. The first is that a lot of industrial machinery uses synchronous motors. And needs them to run an predictable speeds.The European grid has relaxed its specifications so that in many cases e.g. German factories have had to install inverter converters to regenerate the correct mains frequency for their equipment, at huge expense. In periods of high instability is is possible to isolate certain parts of the grid and let one part get out of frequency with respect to the other. But this is not normal working practice.
Additionally due to time delays there is a practical limit to how big a grid can be geographically. The USA pushes that boundary being split IIRC into 3 grids – east, west and central.
The second reason why frequency is important is that it is a proxy for load imbalance. As load goes up, the generators all slow down, and thereby reduce the voltage on the grid. That lowering of voltage and frequency lowers the speed of synchronous motors, lowers the power drawn by resistive loads like incandescent lights, and lowers the speed of any universal style motors that may be on the grid. Which is a signal to open the steam valves and manage the power and frequency up again. Severe imbalance in frequency is a sign they can’t actually manage to do that, and a signal to start load shedding or bring on emergency power.
What a lowering of voltage and frequency does not do, however , is lower the power drawn by electronic equipment, including some lighting, nearly all computers and anything else connected via an SMPS (switched mode power supply) like e.g. an electric car charger…unless it has that built in to its electronics.
Another beneficial effect of using phase locked generators that has been mentioned here before, is that the combined spinning mass of all these armatures represents a small amount of stored kinetic energy, so that when for example, a line short happens or a power station trips, the frequency does not immediately drop drastically – instead it slows down as the kinetic energy feeds the grid until balance is restored.
So far I have described a grid without intermittent renewables, or DC inter-connectors. Hydro power and wood burning plant is ‘conventional’, in that it behaves in a similar way to steam turbines coupled to rotating generators, but DC inter connectors, solar panels and windmills behave very differently, and this introduces yet another complication to the ‘all renewable’ scenario dreamed up by the politicians. Wind and sun represent no storage whatsoever beyond perhaps a few milliseconds. They cannot generate more than they already are, in nearly all cases, and whilst capacitance of a high voltage undersea cable is quite large, it is not nearly large enough to store even a few MW seconds, so all these forms of generator have no rotational inertia at all, They are all utilising inverters that detect the grid frequency and match their output to it frequency and voltage wise electronically, And if the frequency is not what they expect it to be, they disconnect themselves.
Thus they are not only useless at supplying extra power during short term overloads, they may in fact compound the problem by removing themselves from a grid they no longer recognise as a stable sink for power.
In fact the addition of Tesla style batteries is – unbeknownst to the public – actually more about providing a short term proxy for rotational inertia than it is about the long term storage of ‘renewable energy’.
If the Spanish grid showed severe overload it might well have been policy to split it, so that the most highly overloaded region could in fact drift downwards in frequency as a unit, leaving the test of the West European grid intact. I haven’t investigated. But what it would not have done is had generators out of frequency and phase-lock on it. Not for longer than the time it takes to destroy a 600MW generator and most of the building it sits in.
One very important fact omitted from your low frequency explanation , is that the RMS voltage [ effective working voltage for AC ] goes down as a square of frequency drop .
So , not only will low frequency start to destroy most electronic equipment , it can also increase current consumption on some resistive items .
Which is why the RoCoF controls shut down after only a few seconds of frequency drop , & before electric motors & transformers start burning out .
I confess to a shameful hope that there will be at least brown-outs in UK this winter as that may be the only way to alert Joe Public to the fact that Green may be Good, but it is no substitute for reliable, affordable power from tax-guzzling generators that don’t depend on whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.
Gas (which has been the BIG beneficiary of closing down coal-fired capacity) fits the bill, providing that there are adequate supplies. Nuclear should be a good base, but closures of time-expired plant are cutting supplies while cost and time overruns mean that contracted new plant are nowhere near ready to replace them and there has to be a big question mark over whether more major projects are affordable or desirable. Biomass doesn’t have a big share of the market, but it has been running flat out during the recent cold spell (it’s down a bit today, perhaps for maintenance).
The little remaining coal-fired capacity has also been running hard lately, but unless the Government wakes up to the risks of trying to keep the lights on without it, it is all due to close in the next couple of years. It is also subject to constraints on running hours, although I think they can be overruled to ensure security of supply. Fortunately, some generators ran the figures and decided to keep their plant running as long as they could up to the industry expiry date, counting on income from operating for the few weeks allowed and hoping for some extra from extreme weather permits. As I recall, some of the details hinged on EU carbon reduction/energy legislation, but I don’t know whether the Government has more flexibility post-Brexit.
On wider coal problems, last week’s press featured stories from UK ‘heritage railways’, most of which run steam locomotives, worried that they will be wholly reliant on (poorer quality) imported coal within two years. There is only one remaining significant mine in UK – Ffos y fran, in South Wales. This has been extracting coal as part of a major surface restoration project (the site had been worked from the surface for several centuries, leaving an unknown number of unrecorded pits and shafts, plus related spoil and any amount of unlicensed dumps of asbestos, chemicals, etc.). Permission was sought to work and restore an adjacent area in a similarly unsafe condition but without success, and applications for mines in other parts of the country have also been refused in the face of NunNut lobby hysteria. Which is one more reason why I can’t help thinking that a brown-out or two might concentrate minds wonderfully in Whitehall and in the media.
Leo –>
“grids are all completely phase locked, It is simply not possible for a generator to ‘be on a different frequency’.” Did you not read the article that Ron Clutz posted?
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2019/08/16/on-stable-electric-power-what-you-need-to-know/
Individual fossil fuel generators are not “phase locked” to each other through any kind of circuitry other than the grid and the power needed.
You contradicted yourself within two sentences.
“ It is not even really possible for them to be out of phase. Slight variations in phase are simply indicative of how much power the generators are putting on, or indeed drawing off, the grid. So that if for example a steam turbine fails, the generator wont stop, it will simply drop its phase back a little and become a motor running off the grid rather than a generator on it. Until it is disconnected.”
Why do you think “a motor running off the grid” is not a bad thing? This means that it has become an extra load for other generators to supply when the grid has probably already exceeded its reserve.
From the above article: “It should now be clear how central a role that synchronously connected angular momentum plays in power system stability. It is the factor that determines how much time generator governors and automatic load shedding systems have to respond to the power flow variation and bring correction.”
This is not a phase locked system where all the components operate in unison from a single control point. It is a system where individual components act individually based upon a common parameter.
Thought I’d have a look how the German electricity grid is coping.
Here is the supply/demand for Jan 7,8,9
Notice the size of the grey CONVENTIONAL supply Solar nd wind are TINY amounts at the bottom
And just so there is no confusion as to what “conventional” means
….. here is the graph for that supply.
Some Nuclear along the bottom, but mostly COAL and GAS.
We had 3Gw of coal power production at times last week when wind production dropped due to areas of high pressure covering the country
Can’t you Poms find some more oil to sell to fund the rollout of EVs in order to change the climate like Norway?
Norway’s electric car drive belies national reliance on fossil fuels (msn.com)
On second thoughts if they’re making things a bit chilly just grab their oil and use it in your generators and furnaces and get the best of both worlds. You still rule the waves over there don’t you or have you reverted back to sail already?
NorthWest England, Lancaster 3 or so miles from the coast. We had a 4 hour power cut on Dec 19th and since have had several nights of -4C with most days only managing +2C if that. Today we actually have a thaw. The Lancaster canal has been frozen for days. Not as cold as the 2010 winter when the river froze. That year I saw a swan that had slept with its tail in the water. Very difficult to walk round on the ice with several Kg of ice attached to your tail.