From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Of all the problems with electric cars, perhaps the least expected was the revelation that some home charging points provide a potential point of weakness for malign foreign powers to interfere with our National Grid. Last week, the Office for Product Safety and Standards ordered the company Wallbox to stop selling its Copper SB chargers because hackers could potentially access the chargers and incapacitate the grid by such means as suddenly turning on thousands of chargers full-pelt at the same time.
But do we really need a foreign power to crash our electricity grid when we are quite capable of inflicting it on ourselves? We are heading for a big electricity crunch as it is. Whoever wins the general election, the next government will be committed to decarbonising the National Grid – by 2035 in the case of the Conservatives and by 2030 in the case of Labour. That means either closing all the gas power stations or fitting them with carbon capture and storage technology – which does not yet exist on scale in Britain and whose costs are likely to be massive. At the same time every single one of our existing nuclear power stations is currently due to reach the end of its life by 2035. If Hinkley C is delayed much beyond its latest estimated completion, we could end up with no nuclear at all.
That could leave us trying to power the country pretty much with intermittent wind and solar energy alone – and this at a time when politicians want millions more of us to be driving electric cars and heating our homes with heat pumps, thus substantially increasing demand. How will we keep the lights on? One struggles to find satisfactory explanation from the National Grid ESO, which is trusted with this task.
It has produced a vision for a winter’s day in 2035 which foresees massive amounts of energy being stored in the form of green hydrogen produced via the electrolysis of water – a technology which may not be ready by then. It also sees Britain importing around a quarter of its electricity. What happens if the countries we import it from are also short of renewable energy, it doesn’t say.
But another large part of the picture seems to be “demand flexibility” – a polite term for rationing energy through smart meters, jacking up the price whenever supply is short. No wonder the Government seems keener than ever to force smart meters on us. The latest wheeze is to announce that, from next year the radio signal which are used to switch old-style electricity meters onto cheaper, night-time Economy 7 tariffs will be switched off, meaning that customers without a smart meter will always be charged the daytime tariff.
The trouble is, smart meters aren’t working very well. A survey last month by Which? revealed that 40 per cent of consumers say they have had problems with the electricity company not receiving readings remotely. The Government admitted in December that 2.7 million out of 33 million smart meters are working in “dumb” mode. Ofgem has said that, in future, electricity companies will repair the meters for free rather than offering only a one year warranty.
How devious it was to lumber customers with the cost of repairing smart meters when old style analogue meters were always the property of electricity companies and it was their responsibility to keep them in working order.
But even if your meter is working, don’t be fooled by the claim that it will save you money. When we get “dynamic tariffs”, they are unlikely to be anything like Economy 7 where the daytime and nighttime prices are fixed and easy to understand. When the wind drops and the sun goes down, it will require eye-watering electricity prices to persuade enough people to turn off their appliances to avoid blackouts.
It won’t take an enemy power to put us all in the dark – just energy customers doing normal things on a normal winter’s evening.
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Blackout
Now there is a term that needs updating to the new renewable generation.
Green outs will suffice
Rolling blackout. The first time I saw the term was in a novel from the 1970s playing in California.
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It needs one (perhaps two) prolonged blackouts with resulting deaths to bring politicians to their senses. The problem is the current lot of politicians have no senses to fall back on.
Philip, I wish I shared your optimism re politicians and their ability to make changes to policy based on feedback events, i.e. when people suffer they change the policy causing the pain.
Unfortunately too many of our politicians as you say have no sense, and the other ones are simply malign.
Unfortunately, like several commenters here, it would be gas that gets the blame…gas and an under supply of
stupidityrenewablesThe god of wind is infallible so must be appeased when angry by more offerings not less
The most likely source of a blackout is an interconnector trip when running a lot of wind and solar. A lightning strike taking out a major transmission line is another key risk – illustrated once again recently in Australia.
Power rationing, 3 day week style (or as in South Africa currently), is an increasing risk as existing dispatchable capacity shuts down through old age if it is not replaced. Judging from the results of the recent Capacity Market auctions (including today’s T-4 auction, which cleared at £65/kW/a) there may be difficulty a year ahead persuading enough capacity to stay available. A concern is that more and more of the deemed effective capacity comes from short term storage, interconnectors and demand side response (i.e. paid for power cuts). That works if you just have to meet a peak hour demand, but it isn’t really good enough for Dunkelflaute. We’ve already seen Ireland and Norway effectively limit interconnector exports in tight market conditions. It will take some analysis to understand the degree of risk, as the key information has to be assembled separately.
Yesterday in the UK windmills were generating 0.5GW and we were importing 27% of our electricity requirements.
Yes. This is from an installed base of 28GW faceplate.
I keep quoting Jon Butterworth (CEO of National Gas) on this.
No-one at a policy forming level in the UK seems to understand the implications of this. The Labour Party, which will almost certainly form the next government in November, is proposing to make UK electricity generation zero emission by 2030. But it has no plans or ideas on how to accommodate the intermittency of supply from both wind and solar.
Have any of them considered the consequences of a nationwide blackout? You don’t just turn it back on, it takes a week or ten days to get back to normal running. No modern society can run with tens of nationwide blackouts a year.
I guess its called denialism.
An erstwhile Tory, I have never voted labour in my life. But the Tories are a cringe-making clown-show now and I have to vote for something. I find myself holding my nose and muttering, in hope not confidence, “The unions will make Labour see sense.”
It is a slim hope, but there ain’t no option. Even if Reform turn out to have some idea how to make the country irresistibly investable they can’t beat Labour before the lights go out.
Reform won’t beat Labour this election, but voting for them will give the Tories a bloody nose and a reason to move back to to their old principles – or Reform will eat their lunch.
Who knows, maybe suffering four years of Liebour incompetence and Draconian policies, the electorate might just feel bold enough to try an alternative party.
Whichever, we’re going to have a tough & rough four years.
The US has had 4 years of what you speak under Brandon and this years presidential election of about 50/50 IMHO.
Don’t even think that having the left in control will cause the morons who are supported by government money, and ever bigger portion of the “voters” of every western “democracy”, will vote against their pocketbook.
Either TRUMP! and the right wins in November and institutes massive change, as in Argentina, or the entire west will collapse.
Look at Europe. They are still looking to the US to fund their war in Ukraine when, as noted by TRUMP!, MOST NATO countries failed to meet their agreed upon 2% GDP military requirement. Note also that Eastern European countries, those near Russia, HAVE been meeting or exceeding that level of military spending, for obvious reasons. The Western European countries, with the nice buffer of Ukraine and other Eastern countries, did not. The LEAST they can do now is make up the last 20 years of deficient spending by fully funding Ukraine. Doing that would make ANY input from the US unnecessary.
What TRUMP! said was that he would help defend those countries who met their obligation, not those who shirked that obligation. I sort of agree with that but doing so would stop any aggression toward western Europe since the eastern countries DID meet the obligation.
Finally, under TRUMP! the US MUST terminate NATO and return to bilateral treaties. With the UK, since the UK does ACT. And with countries with right leaning governments only. Italy, Poland and Romania come to mind. Leave the socialists and communists to fend for themselves.
End Rant/
I wouldn’t call that a rant, more truthful analysis. As for Trump’s provocative comment about NATO etc. He just likes to rattle their cages.
He just does what his paymasters in the Kremlin tell him to do.
A very immature comment.
There is no left or right. It is either Big (Brother) dictatorial Government or We The People. As long as they can make you believe Fascism or Nazism are the opposite of Marxism and not the same those behind the curtain will be in power.
China has done quite well under Marxism since the US companies have moved most of their big factories there to avoid pollution penalties.
The last time Trump was president the US had 14.8 percent unemployment—the highest unemployment since the Great Depression.
He tried to pretend he was “tough” and not wear a mask and got COVID and had to be life-flighted to the hospital to get an experimental treatment.
the US had 14.8 percent unemployment
What, exactly, was going on in the world at that time, and what was the unemployment rate prior to that occurrence?
They all work for the same master. Doesn’t matter who you vote for it will be Big Brother yes or yes.
The Tories are just Labour 2 .
What puzzles me about that Jim, it’s been the same for several days, low UK demand, but gas has almost been turned off, and yet we’ve imported. Seems, they’d rather pay an extortionate European price, than an economical UK gas price.
In a 4.5 hour stretch between 21:00 Feb 24 to 01:30 Feb 25, wind averaged less than 0.2GW. This is less than 2% of the 11 or so GW which I see today and well under 1% of faceplate capacity. And solar provided nothing during that time, of course. More proof that these sources, besides their innate ugly impact on the landscape require virtually 100% backup. Expense heaped upon expense heaped upon degraded quality of life.
https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/download.php
BUT who gets a cut of the
Of course the cronies.
I think they like playing with the trainset. Their objective is to be able to run the grid without fossil fuels, so they keep practising. Back on 22nd December they were running with close to 50% wind when suddenly the IFA1 interconnector from France tripped out 1GW, which led to a cascade of events that saw a frequency nadir of 49.275 Hz. The system failed to arrest the frequency decline properly, leading to other generation being tripped offline until eventually Dinorwig cranked up to max power. They still haven’t explained what happened having come quite close to blackouts – another 10 seconds delay in response (perhaps less) and they would have occurred. Here’s the second by second frequency chart:
Here’s the generation and interconnector flows at 5 minute resolution: unfortunately not quite sufficient to understand what happened in the immediate aftermath of the IFA1 trip to cause the frequency to drop so far. It should have been arrested at the first turning point around 49.65 Hz.
That’s very optimistic. I think it would take years of “Independent” Commission research to drag answers out of the people involved, and all that would happen is some convenient excuse would be found – the wrong sort of electricity maybe – and a few scapegoats would get a slap on the wrist, and the rest would promise to build more windmills and solar panels.
After all, what are a few OAP deaths on the way to Utopia, comrades? /sarc
“the wrong sort of electricity maybe”. It had lumps in it, and struggled to get through the narrow wires.
You mean nonsense, Phillip?
Unfortunately – by the time blackouts and brownouts occur, it will be too late.
The circumstances leading up to that failure point will require *years* to resolve.
Building greater grid capacity and/or bringing back fossil fuels at scale is a multi-year exercise – potentially decadal on the grid side.
Last night was too windy for…. wind turbines
l wonder how much it cost to turn them off?
Today so far there has been 32.7GWh of curtailment, and balancing costs are at £6.12m. Of course, curtailment is often matched by paying for other generation to provide power that couldn’t be transmitted because of lack of pylons and interconnectors.
The complete failure to review any Reality Checks, in the matter of greenie energy craziness, suggests an ulterior motive (or maybe insanity?). Not going to end well.
nice one “reality checks”
as per the attached.
= my Cumbrian peer Dr John Campbell, talking about lockdown
Blackouts are the new lockdowns, enforced by smart meters, cameras everywhere, electric cars, 15 minute cities, this ‘zone’, that ‘zone’ and god knows what’s next ‘zone’
Those numbed out faces are causing it all… that ‘numbness’ is = The Reality Disconnect
See them everywhere when you quit alcohol and sugar – the lights are on but no-one is home.
sigh, my numbness forgot the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Iqa4CoMciU
(First 5 minutes are all you need)
Good to see a Psychologist that is Reality aware, and took action trying to mitigate the impact (of Covid Lockdowns against children). A breath of fresh air in that interview video.
Apparently British politicians can’t see the windmill/solar/Net Zero trainwreck coming. They are still “full steam ahead” with destroying their nation over an unwarranted fear of CO2.
As Pogo wisely said: We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Some of us…
since forced smart meters (2 of which were duds) the supply charge went from 18 a quarter to HALF my bill per Month. the states attorney general said the ONLY benefit from them was TO powercos and boy was he right! (and he was ignored by Labor govt)
Like Germany…no, wait…the german grid got more stable over the past years.
And there is always enough energy for some fearmongering…
Germany? Thankfully we’re no longer bound by the diktats of the fourth reich.
Pass the popcorn, would you…
Fortunately for the Germans, France supplies ample baseload nuclear power when Wind and Solar fail.
MUN also wants to ignore the fact that Germany is importing as much coal-fired power as it can from Poland, and as much electricity from the Scandinavian states Norway and Sweden as possible. In the case of Sweden, that also includes nuclear power.
Plus the power from Poland which mostly used coal, a major resource for them
That’s because all the big manufacturing users are moving elsewhere. !
Green Energies Shattering German Economy…Industrial Production Falls 7th Consecutive Month (notrickszone.com)
And let’s not worry about all the people who can no longer afford the very expensive electricity in cold German winters..
Heat Becomes Unaffordable In Germany… Seniors Struggle, Staying Warm At Public Heating Places… (notrickszone.com)
It occurs to me that if “Economy 7” meters are switched by radio signals, it should be possible, nay easy, to make a simple transmitter yourself.
Must look into that!
Anything electronic and online is hackable – even your humble EV…
“Jessop’s car had gone in 20 seconds. The keys to his Hyundai Ioniq 5 were still inside his house and there was no sign of an accomplice.
“It was just incredible,” said Jessop. “I looked at it and thought: how did that happen? I genuinely thought with all the technology in this car that no one could steal it.” Jessop got no further clues from the Metropolitan police. He filed a report on the night of the theft on 8 February and was told by email at lunchtime the next day the case had been closed.”
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/feb/24/smart-keys-car-crime-thieves-hi-tech-arms-race
Pen and paper, petrol/diesel engines, screwdrivers and spanners…
Maybe there was a golden age – when you were in charge of your vehicle.
I don’t know why I didn’t notice this till today. Looking at the stats for the last year, except for a footling amount sent to Ireland (e.g. the 450MW we’re supplying as I write), the UK rarely ever supplies power via the interconnects. For practical purposes we only consume.
Is European power consistently the cheaper option? Our combined cycle gas generation is currently running at about half capacity.
A service economy provides bods to do odd jobs….
The UK imports 10-15% of its electricity from France, the year around, where it is generated in nuclear power plants. And has the French laughing all the way to the bank.
That gets to the question I am asking. I don’t care if we’re paying the French a decent price for nuclear power provided they are selling it to us for less than it would cost us to generate our own.That would be comparative advantage at work and everyone wins. But. But but but. Is French leccy the cheaper option?
Guess who is now a major owner of UK based generation…..EDF , the 85% government owned french generator which produces most of frances electricity
It’s in their commercial interest to sell french power at premium prices to Brits
This situation will only get worse as the remaining AGRs close down. This threatens to further reduce Britain’s 12% of its electricity from nuclear power. These reactor shutdowns cannot be avoided and can only be compensated for by more nuclear power construction. HPC is necessary for this reason, as is undertaking Sizewell C as soon as possible.
At this time, electrical imports from France are the only available offshore power on a firm power purchase basis.
In 2022 we spent much of the year topping up France while they repaired their nuclear power stations. We ran extra gas fired power to do it. Chart here showing daily average flows. Imports and exports are shown separately, so if we export overnight but import during the day over a particular interconnector, both import and export are shown, rather than the net position.
I was curious about this potential cyber threat, and my research lead me to Upstream’s 2024 Global Automotive Cybersecurity Report (registration required).
EV charger highlights:
There are plenty of details about how modern, connected vehicles (not just EVs) are potentially vulnerable to cyber attacks.
Humm. Just like flushing every toilet in the dorm. First thing you learn as a freshman. You can make bad things happen. Who-da-thunk?
Time to buy a diesel tractor and a map of downtown London.
When some of that hydrogen explodes when air and a spark are available and people realize it burns with an invisible flame, a person needs IR goggles to see the flame, it will be the end of so-called “green” hydrogen.