From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
We all knew it was going to happen, but the green blob turned a blind eye:
It was the warning Ed Miliband didn’t want to hear.
Days after the Energy Secretary pledged low-carbon power for all at Labour’s annual conference, energy giant EDF discussed plans to close four of the UK’s five remaining nuclear power stations.
Two are currently scheduled to close in 2026, followed by another two in 2028.
“They can’t go on forever,” said Rachael Glaeving, commercial director at EDF’s UK business.
“Any life extension of these power stations is going to be measured in months.”
The decision, announced after thorough engineering reviews, is set to make Miliband’s dream a lot harder. He has promised to deliver a net zero power grid by 2030, although in practice this is expected to mean 95pc green energy – with the remainder coming from burning gas.
Eventually, if the Government succeeds in the scale of wind and solar farm construction envisaged, it could lead to an abundance of energy.
But in the nearer term, some fear the breakneck pace of change could stretch the grid to the limit. In September, the country’s last coal-fired power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, closed.
As Britain’s reactor fleet shrivels, the amount of nuclear capacity will fall from six gigawatts (GW) today to just 1.2 GW by 2028 or soon after. Along with rising demand from power-hungry data centres and technologies of the future, it will make it even harder to keep the lights on when wind and solar generation is low.
Against this backdrop, the National Energy System Operator (Neso), the newly nationalised body overseeing the electricity grid, is turning to households and businesses to help balance the system.
Last week, it announced year-round plans to manage demand by paying consumers to cut their electricity usage at times of tight supply.
The so-called demand flexibility service has been billed as a forward-looking way to manage an increasingly complex and “smart” system, as we move from using a small number of large coal and gas-fired plants to relying on a plethora of intermittent sources of wind and solar power – backed up by batteries, energy-storing giant flywheels, interconnectors and other gadgets.
Yet some critics warn this all looks strikingly similar to rationing, especially coming at a time when electricity production continues to fall.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/13/why-age-of-energy-rationing-is-looming-for-britain
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The so-called demand flexibility service has been billed as a forward-looking way to manage an increasingly complex and “smart” system
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Smart ? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
There is this thing called “base-load” demand.. It is generally rather inflexible.
The performance record of DFS so far has been an expensive failure. Payments of up to £6,000/MWh were made, with significant numbers understanding how to game the system by setting fake demand baselines so that the “savings” made when the system was paying out were illusory. Even so, the measured maximum saving was a paltry 300MW – less than 1% of demand. Lots of CCGT plants would be very happy to supply 300MW for less than 10% of that price.
The cost goes on consumer bills.
Click on this chart to enlarge it (and enlarge it again), and see just how irrelevant DFS has been so far
Remember “SMART” means Self Monitoring And Reporting Technology.
I was born in Great Britain to two US citizens. I had duel citizenship until I declared US. Thank God!!!! These British types are Looney Tunes!!
Dude, have you *seen* who’s running for the Democrats? You’re one election away from being in the same boat. Unfortunately, it will take a few headlines featuring OAPsicles before Starmer and his lot are forced to remove their tentacles from the levers of power. I just hope Reform are ready to take over when that happens.
If you mean Kam-Moo-La Harris, I will never vote for that stupid nonsense.
I’m trying to get my Democrat “friends” to vote for Trump, but that will never happen.
Indeed, they have stop responding to my texts.
Thank your lucky stars 😀
Your friends probably clean their phones after getting those texts. 🙂
“Duel citizenship”? Did you have to fight a duel for it, then?
Strange…
Now, now: he is American and so can spell words any way he likes!
Worcester, Gloucester, Beauchamp (Place, London), … Folks who live in glass houses …
Don’t worry, us English will learn you how to talk proper! 😉
Leicester, Derby, Ghandi…
5:00am GMT… and Gas is currently carrying 50% of UK demand.
How much extra reliable electricity is available if there is no wind at night time?
If it is not enough to meet demand.. you get “rationing” (or whatever other euphemism you want to use)
10:15 am
Gas = 54%
Renewables = 17%
Imports from EU = 9%
Last 12 mths
Gas = 27%
Renewables = 38%
Imports from EU = 12%
https://grid.iamkate.com/
” net zero power grid by 2030″
Go Milliband …
Please just go, before you kill 1,000s
Curious. Neither of the energy percentages you listed add to 100%. What makes up the other roughly 20%?
Nuclear and biomass
Gadgets like this⸮ Or maybe the authors are referring to those clever DEFRs or ‘Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources’ that the Manhattan Contrarian told us about a few weeks ago.
Rube Goldberg was ahead of his time, he would be just the man to come to Ed Miliband’s rescue as energy consultant:
Hooray! After 24 hours at one and a bit gigawatts, British wind is as I write producing THREE gigawatts
Electricity prices rising faster than the average incomes ARE a form of rationing the use of electricity.
Time of day electricity pricing does the same thing if prices are hiked for 3pm to 7pm on weekdays, or some other period. That rationing could be offset by lower electricity prices al other times of the day, so electric bills remain unchanged. But that rarely happens
If it is hot on a summer afternoon and you can’t afford electricity to run your AC for the peak price afternoon hours, then you have been rationed by the high prices.
Rationing has a broad definition in economics:
In a market economy, prices are a common way to ration goods and services. When demand for a product is high and supply is low, prices increase, which limits access to those who can’t or won’t pay more. Higher prices discourage demand and encourage consumers to conserve resources.
While prices can be an effective rationing mechanism, they can disproportionately affect lower-income individuals. The social cost of high prices that lead to rationing food, water, or housing can be significant, especially if those resources are not abundant.
The end game in the UK is to pass wholesale price fluctuations (due to wind intermittency) onto the buyer via smart meters. So price changes every half hour.
This makes it impossible to plan. Timers will not help. You have to imagine you have a display on your kitchen table. At 5.20pm it says 30p per kWh. You start to get supper for the kids, using an electric stove. At 5.30 it moves to £3.00. At 6pm its up to £10.00. At 6.30 its down to 50p., at 8pm its £1.50. Same in the morning. You have no idea how much your shower will cost. Put your washing machine to turn on at night, you have no guarantee prices will be lower then, it depends on the wind. There may be a full week in January when your heat pump is just turned off.
What Nick and the wind/solar advocates, the net zero advocates, need to tell the world is, take the case of the UK. Its December 2030 and net zero has been accomplished. Demand is, lets say, 50 GW peak, average about 35.
How much wind faceplate?
How much solar?
How much gas?
And what are you going to do on December 18 at 4pm, when demand is 50GW, but there is no solar and your 90GW of wind is only producing 5 GW, and has for the last 8 hours?
Human ingenuity will find a way.
Prepare the week’s meals on Sunday using relatively cheap electricity. Freeze them then microwave on weekday evenings. Food is important.
I do our washing overnight as much as possible to give the daylight hours for drying and ironing. Usually checking for a breezy day first.
But I can’t see any good reason why these workarounds should be forced on people.
Come dunkleflaute in December then we’re all in trouble as it will be Europe wide.
The problem is, with the half hour pricing moving with the wind generation, for all you know. set the washer for 3AM and you could be being charged £10 per kWh! It just depends on whether the wind is going to drop then. You have no way of knowing, certainly not in advance.
Even if you start your wash at normal rates, they could soar half way through.
They’ll need super computers to keep track of it all- how much you use at any time and what the price was. Those super computers will have a large carbon footprint!
As you say, no good reason to force people to jump through these hoops.
Yes there is, it’s to save the world.
/s
For the sarcasm impaired.
I got conned into having a Smart meter a few years ago when I changed energy supplier and tariff, the benefits of having one aren’t that great compared to the cost to the industry and therefore the consumer of fitting them. I can see now why the government is so keen on them and I think demand pricing is a retrograde step for society, especially for a cause which is impossible to qualify or to have an effect on (CC).
Another “feature” of electrical Smart meters that is not well publicised is that they have a built in disconnect switch. This could be used for rationing purposes.
This makes it technically possible to control power on an individual basis. When, not “if”, the grid gets overloaded due to the lack of wind, don’t be surprised to see your power gets switched off for a few hours (unless of course you are registered as a “vulnerable person” / “key worker” etc.)
We’re all vulnerable.
Yep, but adding unreliable energy drives up prices and distort market signals.
Well, no, in fact. The “vision” is short by at least 80% in scale capacity, but infinitely inadequate in terms of practicality.
Without an industrial base, UK will be unable to pay for more than a third of the wind and pv installations imagined.
The UK government insists on falsely treating Megawatts theoretical capacity as real, MW hours of generated electricity.
Whereever they are produced (China) or installed (farmland, fisheries) wind turbines and PV panels require coal, natural gas, and petroleum for production, installation, and operation. Rather than reducing emissions, the lifespan of these installations, with the intermittent shortfall of production, will require increased use of “fossil” fuels.
With half or more of today’s wind generated energy bought from producers in Europe, and those countries’ baseline power demand provided by natural gas and nuclear energy, rather than looking “strikingly similar to rationing,” it appears more like conquest and dominance. With much of that imported electricity being provided by oil and gas producing Norway, perhaps one should think of it as King Harald’s revenge — even if the would be conquering noble this time might be named something like Van Der Leyen.
Scotland has wanted to become a Scandinavian country, again.
The vision is, in the original meaning of the term, a pipe dream.
It’s raining again…. Naff all solar and wind.
This is the future. Cold, grey and wet.
It’s also been the past for much of the ‘summer’ here in NE Wales.
When ever I see “energy-storing giant flywheels” I think of Ed Millivolt trying to keep them all spinning at the same time.
https://youtu.be/Cb6NS_F5xTE?si=nO75DL9gv2KWpnSE
The issue is that it is now entirely clear to all (or most!) that the world cannot continue as it is – let alone expand – with only renewable energy.
What, you man 8 billion people can’t all live with only renewables? But.. but.. then the planet will burn up and the oceans will boil!
Peak times, with no solar will be breakfast and evening meal.
What are poorer people meant to do , not cook their food??
Why are leftist ideologies SO DISGUSTINGLY ANTI-HUMAN.
Eat at a different time?
They prefer they didn’t eat and to get back to work in their fields and homes 🙁
You don’t need power to eat your gov’t approved insect snacks.
And you can use that rusty razor for another 6 months, Winston.
Wonderful news! As they demonstrated for years following the end of WWII, Brits love rationing and queues.
Story tip
It started sooner than thought !!!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/14/blackout-prevention-plan-activated-britain/
A backstop system designed to prevent blackouts has been activated for the first time in two years as Britain’s power grid battles low winds and plummeting temperatures.
The surprise notice for the capacity market, which issues a warning to Britain’s electricity generators, was issued by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) just after midday on Monday.
It told generators to be ready for when demand spikes at 4:30pm, amid fears the amount of spare power capacity had grown unacceptably small compared to demand.
However, the notice was withdrawn just after 2pm.
British governments love “rationing”…It took a whole decade after WWII to drop the program…just the reduction of so many internal meetings about the availability of shoe leather and printing paper and whatnot would result in a reduction in jobs in what had become a very large employment sector, albeit unproductive…not dissimilar to present touted “green jobs” dreams.
It was the main reason the labour party lost to the conservatives in 1951. We were told rationing was good for us, and we should like it.
I think 1951 they were kicked out, and Churchill came back.
See this latest article from The Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York:
Catastrophic Costs of Green Energy (Roger Caiazza, October 10th)
Roger’s article includes a link to this report.
The Crippling Costs of Electrification and Net Zero Energy Policies in the Pacific Northwest (Discovery Institute, September 2024)
Later this month, one of our local Public Utility Districts here in southeastern Washington State will be presenting its concerns in a public meeting about the growing near-term risk of blackouts in the US Northwest as a direct consequence of the region’s highly aggressive Net Zero energy policies.
I’m planning on attending this meeting and will report back in a few weeks with my comments on what was presented.
Let them eat soup….from climate protest leftovers.
Let them eat insects.
Story Tip
From the UK Telegraph.
A backstop system designed to prevent blackouts was mobilised for the first time in two years as Britain’s power grid battles low winds and nuclear outages.
The surprise notice for the capacity market, which issues a warning to Britain’s electricity generators, was issued by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) just after midday on Monday.
It told generators to be ready for when demand spikes at 4:30pm, amid fears the amount of spare power capacity had grown unacceptably small compared to demand.
However, the notice was withdrawn just after 2pm…..
….On Monday at 12.30pm, grid data showed that gas power stations had been fired up to meet roughly 53pc of the country’s electricity needs, with wind and solar providing just 10pc each.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/14/blackout-prevention-plan-activated-britain/
Meanwhile, how much was wind generating yesterday and today? From gridwatch:
Today
minimum: 2.039 GW maximum: 4.223 GW average: 3.249 GW
Yesterday
minimum: 0.82 GW maximum: 14.167 GW average: 5.769 GW
Why anyone thinks this is a feasible way to power a country?
Those numbers, by the way, are from 30 GW of wind faceplate.
I started the attached graph primarily to follow the decline of the “Coal” contribution to the GB electricity grid, but included “Nuclear” to track how the “baseload” part would evolve for the rest of the decade.
Following EDF’s “update” on Hinkley Point C in January, however, I had to modify the X-axis.
With the closure of Ratcliffe on Soar at the end of September the focus is now exclusively on the “Nuclear” part.
Looking at the situation from Q1 2028 onwards, I believe the appropriate phrase is something along the lines of “Thou art fooked, my son” …
Just as worrying is that old CCGT plants are going to need to be replaced soon too, and the Capacity Market has almost totally failed to bring forward new capacity. The parameters for the next auction early in 2025 have been set, and offer no better terms than last year: there is a fond belief that we can get away without building more – Miliband seems to think that windmills or interconnectors will substitute, so he cut the target capacity to be acquired. That is going to leave us short of supply. The loss of the permanent nuclear underpinning of grid inertia will also be felt: the system is simply not reliable enough to handle upsets from interconnector losses on high renewables days (therefore with little CCGT running) without it.
The Brits really need to wake up and kick their gums out. It is time.
Data centers will speed up the crisis.
Data centres will be built elsewhere. Except for MI5 specials.
You might want to catch up on the latest news.