Essay by Eric Worrall
The alert was withdrawn after 2 hours. An energy spokesman insists there is no cause for alarm.
Blackout prevention system mobilised as Britain battles low winds
First capacity warning in two years later withdrawn
Matt Oliver Industry Editor
14 October 2024 3:03pm BSTA 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However, the notice was withdrawn just after 2pm.
A spokesman for the Neso insisted it was “confident that electricity margins are sufficient for this evening” and stressed the triggering of the original notice was automatic.
…
But Tom Greatrex, chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association, warned that the notices risked becoming more commonplace as Britain’s ageing nuclear power stations were switched off this decade.
Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/14/blackout-prevention-plan-activated-britain/
…
Thankfully your genius Minister for Net Zero Energy Security has a plan to keep British energy supplies secure.
Anger at UK’s ‘bonkers’ plan to reach net zero by importing fuel from North Korea
Government criticised over list of potential countries for sourcing biomass, which also includes Afghanistan
Isabella Kaminski
Wed 9 Oct 2024 20.37 AEDTA plan by the British government to burn biomass imported from countries including North Korea and Afghanistan has been described as “bonkers”, with critics saying it undermines the credibility of the UK’s climate strategy.
A bioenergy resource model, published in late summer, calculates that only a big expansion in the import of energy crops and wood from a surprising list of nations would satisfy the UK’s plan to meet net zero.
In a strategy document published last year and since seemingly adopted by the new Labour government, the Sunak government said it wanted biomass to play a “significant role” in decarbonising all sectors of the economy in the years leading up to 2050. Previous administrations have provided more than £20bn to businesses using it in the power and heat sectors over the past two decades.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/09/anger-uk-plan-net-zero-import-biomass-fuel-north-korea
Of course, the North Korean firewood will only be needed to keep the lights on if the flywheels run out of spin.
My suggestion, if even The Guardian is calling your Net Zero plan “bonkers”, it might be time for a rethink. Or possibly a new energy minister.
Importing biomass from abroad is certainly CO2 friendly (yeah riiiight) it only uses a huge amount of diesel to harvest, transport, kiln dry, transport to port, load, ship through the Suez (or around the cape if things heat up in the region), offload and transport to thermal generating sites where it’s burnt creating even more CO2
If it takes 100 years to re-sink the CO2 and regrow the harvested wood you will release 36,525 days of CO2 before the first day’s release has been completely recycled
Yes, but the secret is all of that extra CO2 is created…”somewhere else.”
Excellent, amounts are historically too low.
‘”British Blackout System Mobilised”
What the source said was
“Blackout prevention system mobilised”
Every electric grid is a blackout prevention system. All that happened is that they sent out a notice that more power might be needed. And they got it.
Nonsense.
See New York 2003. Their grid certainly wasn’t a Blackout Prevention System.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
And “the grid” is not a waffle iron — traditionally in EE circles it is a system (or plural) for transmission and distribution (T&D) of electrical energy. Using the popular term “grid” implies that every node is equivalent, which is nonsense.
“Blackout prevention” is done by reliability — of sources (i.e. generators) plus the transmission lines with disconnects and transformers for voltage conversion.
Wind and solar PV are not reliable sources.
DC-AC inverters for solar PV systems are required to disconnect themselves within one cycle from the utility if the frequency goes down.
Nick also doesn’t understand the importance of phase between current and voltage in T&D.
They do not even understand DC-> AC inverters. These devices are designed to maintain frequency, but they still have power (P = VI) limits. When that limit is reached or gone beyond, guess what occurs!
Voltage windows — below the min, off; above the max, off!
The Brits had no extra to push through the interconnectors with Europe so they were just a “Europe doesn’t have any extra because they’re facing the same trouble” away from being FUBAR
Nick, you really are not getting it. Or not admitting it.
The thing to note here is not that the UK has a blackout prevention system. As you say, all grid systems do, and they work more or less well in a crisis.
The thing to note is that in mid-October, so not peak demand season, and at a time of day when solar is still contributing something, the combination of a calm and a fairly small percent of supply from nuclear going offline led to the UK alarm being triggered.
Yes, they got through it this time. But as I asked in other threads, what would you do in 2030, mid-December, at 5pm. Because it is going to happen.
There will be a calm which will have taken wind below 5 GW for a couple of days, as there is every winter. Actually, the calm will probably last for a week or ten days, and will drop supply below 10 GW for that period, but in the middle there will be a day or two with almost total outage.
There will be no solar because its dark. Interconnect to Europe will be low because the calm is very wide area. Demand will have risen from today because of EVs and heat pumps (assuming the program on these works and there is compliance). It will also have risen because of data centers and AI.
So we will have demand north of 45GW, maybe 50 GW, and supply of 10-15 GW, and it will be day 2 of this. This time, in relatively favorable circumstances, and with plenty of gas generation available, they got by. In 2030 on current plans, they will not.
They are facing the end of life of the current gas infrastructure. There aren’t, as far as I know, any plans to replace it with what will be needed, over 40 GW of gas. There is talk about huge amounts of pumped storage in the Highlands, but there is no way that is going to get built and running in that time. Nor will there be enough of it. There is also incidentally no way that the required amount of off-shore wind is going to get built by 2030, but that is another story.
You are avoiding the critical question. That is, the attempt to get UK power generation to Net Zero by 2030 is leading to a predictable shortfall of power, a massive one. It is certain that carrying on with current plans will lead to a shortfall of at least 20-30 GW in the coldest and darkest part of the year. This means blackouts, and it means cold start, and without spinning reserve, that’s going to be problematic. Yes, Ed is planning on flywheels. Will they get built in time? Will they work in a national cold start blackout?
We are going to find out. Tell me why this is wrong. Tell me what you would do on that fateful December afternoon in 2030. Because its totally predictable to anyone who looks at the weather records of the UK and Europe. Its going to happen. What would you do?
It wasn’t a particularly cold or dull day yesterday in my bit of the UK. A degree or two Celsius below average. About average today.
I think things could have been trickier if the wind situation that happened on Sunday, virtually zero wind generation, had happened yesterday when demand would gave been 3 or 4GW greater.
The last 7 days of GB solar: it wasn’t anything to write home about particularly after 4:30pm on 14th.
And just a couple of weeks after last coal station shutdown with great fanfare by the net-zero zealots…
I assume that would have been availsble yesterday to avoid the warning…
No, when they make those announcements they rapidly disable the plant and as quickly as possible blow the facility up to make a point. The activists have taken over, the closure of the coal plant was planned well in advance as was the shutdown of the nuclear plant for refuelling. But they still went ahead to get the headline. They did the same a few years ago and risked a blackout just to be able to say they had used no coal for 24hrs for the first ever time.
Thanks. I was going to reply, but yours was better. Nick often has reasonable comments, but this one was a ridiculous. The point was clear, that wind was not enough to rely on, and the closing of reliable generation over the past few years has put adequate electricity supply at risk.
The problem was wind and nuclear outage.
Just hold an auction and get all the energy needed PDQ.
You could have simply stopped at
The problem was Wind
Nuclear outage was only a problem because they don’t have 100% reliable capacity back-up available…and they have shuttered 14 Nuclear Power Plants since 1989 and only 5 remain. It isn’t a Nuclear Outage but a Nuclear deficit that led to a capacity issue
“because they don’t have 100% reliable capacity back-up available”
Nuclear is supposed to be the 100% reliable backup. Seems it’s not.
100% Nameplate Capacity to meet demand
Nuclear is 100% reliable but they closed 14 of 19 NPPs without replacing the capacity and so do not have 100% of their needs available as back-up. If they had replaced the 14 shuttered plants then 1 down for maintenance wouldn’t have been a problem.
The UK demand peaked at 47.1GW in 2022 but was as high as 62GW in 2002 while their nuclear capacity has dropped from a total of 13.5GW down 7.57 to 5.9GW.
It’s reliable as you well know. The problem is, they shuttered too much.
Poor prior planning produces piss poor performance.
All we are saying…is give Ps a chance
wrong – wrong – wrong. We will all own nothing and we will be happy. Eating roaches and crickets by the way.
and with all the lithium over there in asheville, there will be enough battery backup to power the starlink booster rockets carrying the pilgrims headed to Mars.
you doomsday haters, so negative
Humor… a difficult concept.
The remote expert says “Every electric grid is a blackout prevention system”
How we laughed…
Sadly, our Nick is the shining example of why “experts” in weather reports should stay in their lane and leave electricity production & supply to the real experts in that discipline.
Don’t laugh he was right. NS just made a spelling error, NS meant to say:
‘every 2030 NetZero electric grid is a blackout activation system’
Someone in Britain needs to tell Miliband that The Blitz was over 80 years ago, and blackouts are no longer needed.
Miliband’s father (Adolphe, then later Ralph) came here in ’40 or ’41 as a refugee aged ~17.
“The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose [the war] to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent . . . . To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation”. – Adolphe Miliband
Orwell had this one pegged, too.
LOL, you just made it up since most electrical engineers tells me that black out prevention isn’t needed when there is plenty of addition power resources available.
If you don’t have a grid you get a blackout.
A grid is a blackout prevention system.
The point is that this is normal grid operation. You figure out how much demand to expect. Then if you think there may not be enough generation to meet it, you rustle up some more. The Capacity Auction system seems to formalise this.
Just rustle up some more. Should be easy!
And they did it.
Maybe this time, but in the future? It’ll be easy, huh? When everything is electric and you only have the wind and sun to depend on? Oh, right- and gigantic batteries. Piece of cake.
If you don’t have a grid you get above-average sales of diesel generators.
See : The Australian outback, plus many countries in SE Asia.
Or solar PV with lead-acid battery storage.
For individuals, but for an entire country? Not happening.
The Capacity Auction system is not a true open market. It is the Secretary of State deciding how much capacity to try to procure, sometimes going over the head of the advice given, as Miliband has just done in cutting the next procurement for T-4 to just 44GW, with an expectation of adding no more than 1GW to that in 3 years time. He is planning for power shortages. Extract from his letter to Fintan Slye at National Grid:
Do you ever revisit what you wrote sometimes Nick?
Please tell us you didn’t take a course in clear, cogent expression from Mosh.
You forgot what the article stated, they make clear it was a big drop in power production that caused the problem because Wind Power are intermittent and unreliable a problem Electrical Engineers wouldn’t build because they want grid stability from the start and maintain it which means have additional access to power on standby.
“low winds and nuclear outages.” was the stated cause.
Nuclear outage was only a problem because they don’t have 100% reliable capacity back-up available…and they have shuttered 14 Nuclear Power Plants since 1989 and only 5 remain. It isn’t a Nuclear Outage but a Nuclear deficit that led to a capacity issue.
Low winds and a lack of available reliable back-up (Nuclear, Gas or Coal) was the problem
100%…AKA 100% of their demand available as reliable back-up
But, but, but, they did have ONE nuclear site down at the time, so there was a nuclear outage (not plural).
You are correct, of course.
If you do have a grid you get Blackout. See New York 2003
No what it means that the heavy users, that have signed up to the scheme, are primed to reduce their requirements at the requested times in return for a payment.
ie Energy rationing that you call demand planning or really turning the UK into a 3rd world country.
Yep, it’s called load shedding. Implementing rolling blackouts to prevent blackouts. There is no intelligent life on the left.
What happened is that the grid was buying incremental power for £662/MWh, with the price apparently being set by imports on the BritNed interconnector.
In a nice irony, the Dutch fired up coal capacity to make the export.
This was a rare event – a few hours in two years when prices are high. In the scheme of things that is nothing compared to, say, building a new nuke.
Should have said…
This was a rare event – a few hours in two years when prices are ludicrously high instead of the normal ridiculously unaffordable.
There’s nothing affordable about cheap renewables.
Let’s see what you have to say when it happens again in mid-winter and 10s of thousands of people die from exposure.
Sadly not as rare as all that. NISMs were so frequent they renamed them as EMNs. But more to the point, to suffer a shortage of capacity during the shoulder season doesn’t offer a comforting omen. Even more so for the longer term future, given the complacent attitude to capacity procurement from Miliband, and the station closure schedule ahead for both nuclear and CCGT.
This is Paul Homewood’s take on it – he is even more pessimistic than I have been in my reply to Nick. I omitted to consider the closure of the existing nuclear. Emphasis is mine.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/10/14/miliband-fiddles-while-britain-faces-blackouts/
OK, there was never any chance of a blackout. The purpose of the warning is to get sufficient back up capacity in place in time.
But this is still only October, and there is still a lot more wind power than we would get in a real wind drought in midwinter. Note that wind dropped to 800 MW on Sunday evening.
Today wind power has fallen to 2 GW, about 7% of capacity, while demand has peaked at 35 GW – in winter that could easily rise to 45 GW or more.
https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-by-fuel-type
Interconnectors have been bringing in 4 GW, but the backbone has been 20 GW of CCGT and 4 GW of nuclear. But we already know that all the nuclear bar Sizewell B will be gone by 2028.
Even supposing Miliband gets to triple wind power by 2030, that would still only give us 6 GW, at a time when demand will probably have gone up by that much as well.
Add to that 5 GW of biomass and other bits and pieces, and we will still be potentially 40 GW short in midwinter.
I really hate that style of graph. It conceals far more than it reveals and what it reveals could be shown more simply.
This one annoyed me so much I dug into the data and noticed something I think worth mentioning. That drop-out circa 6am on the 13th was mostly due to interconnectors dropping out; North Sea Link (INTNSL), Netherlands (BritNed), and Belgium (Nemolink).
UK wind was feeble throughout. The only thing that kep the lights on was CCGT. Ignoring pumped hydro, which was late to the party and almost invisible, nothing else responded. Nothing could.
The interconnects provide only a little more than 10% of our power at the “best” of times. You don’t see them peak because they can’t. We are often encouraged to think they will.
If you look at the last month, what do you notice happens to the interconnects (the bottom bands in the graph) every time the wind drops (the dark blue band)?
CCGT is the only tool in the box. If there were anything better or cheaper we’d already be doing it. Since there isn’t, whatever we use instead of CCGT is going to be worse or more expensive. Net Zero is going to be grim.
This chart shows the largely constant elements of supply until demand starts reducing past the evening rush hour peak, during the period affected by the capacity margin notices. See also the separate chart I posted of the variable sources. There is some stabilisation ripple in CCGT output, but it is largely constant at 20GW. It is NOT setting prices, nor are any of the other fixed elements running essentially at capacity.
Re pumped storage, one of the responses on Paul Homewood’s site was from a former Resource Engineer at Dinorwic. He said
“Dinorwic Pumped Storage can provide 9.1 GWh energy at a maximum rate of 1.7GW or so. For the one occasion of 9 days without wind in 2018 we required 7200GWh. Pumped storage is great for a sudden peak but not for any long term storage”
I can see economic and societal collapse in the UK within the next 5 years.
The sooner we get blackouts the better, just to wake people up before it is too late. It will make my investment in an off grid system that can cope with 2 days without a generator wasted but I can live with that if they get rid of Nut Zero.
Make that 18 months
Could be. One early evening in December January or February, no solar. Wind falls to the minimum of the last few days, so its around 800 MW (out of 30 GW faceplate). Demand is up a bit over 45 GW (last year peak was about 47 GW). The max ever from gas is about 28 GW. So there is a gap of a bit under 20 GW. Where is it filled from?
Blackouts this winter are possible, not sure how likely, but they are possible and getting more likely every year as nuclear and gas plant is taken down.
Factor in Sod’s law, michel
That always applies.
That’s Murphy’s Law where I live. BTW, Murphy didn’t write Murphy’s Law; it was another man named Murphy.
Murphy’s Law (with its many variations) is always operating: Whatever can go wrong will … and at the worst possible moment.
And remember: Murphy was an optimist.
Except when you want/need it to go wrong.
A corollary I personally created over 50 years ago while trying to debug a circuit glitch.
It is still Murphy’s Law.
5 years? Maybe. 5 months? Maybe.
Every other mention on BBC radio 4 this morning was political climate/energy propaganda.
Were too reliant on gas (well yer probably 60% of electricity in the instance of this thread, couldn’t have kept the lights on without it). This will cause energy price shocks they say; who stopped the fracking?
But their latest worry is waste to electricity, which is the only sensible way to deal with it, but no, the BBC wants mountains of trash and no electricity.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3wxgje5pwo.amp
“”propaganda.””
They really hate Elon
The BBC blanked the amazing booster catch, but really bigged up Europa Clipper.
Both launched by, er, SpaceX
A spokesman for the Neso insisted it was “confident that electricity margins are sufficient for this evening” and stressed the triggering of the original notice was automatic.
You will all prefer manual triggerings and be happy.
So what happened?
Nuclear output was restricted by the maintenance closure at Sizewell. Maximum CCGT availability was restricted to 20GW out of 25GW, largely due to planned maintenance. Interconnector availability was sharply down: imports from France have been limited to just 1GW via IFA1 since late September, and North Sea Link shut down overnight, presumably to investigate the causes of the trip of its entire capacity last week.
Pumped storage, batteries, OCGT and marginal extra imports on BritNed appear to have provided the balancing supply, as the chart shows. System prices over the peak settlement periods were a consisten £662/MWh for several settlement periods.
Thanks, very informative. Really appreciate these comments from someone who knows the specifics in detail.
I should add that less obviously, the Irish interconnectors had been taking almost 1GW from GB until 4 p.m. BST (times on the chart are GMT). Then generation was ramped up in Ireland to meet theeir own peak and reduce their imports to <300MW, and as little as 123MW at one point.
A quick glance at the headline scared me; I thought the Luftwaffe bombers were entering our airspace……
Story tip
More fancy storage schemes for the UK
https://www.energylivenews.com/2024/10/15/highview-power-launches-2-5gwh-energy-storage-plant-in-scotland/
It’s 12.5 hour duration, so 200MW output from its 2.5 GWh of stored energy. It would need constant topping up due to loss from boiloff/imperfect insulation.
For it to be viable I wonder what cost per gwh it needs to charge.
Plus the subsidies.
“LET’S DO NET ZERO”LET’S NOT AND SAY WE DID
Also, self-discharge, at around 2% capacity loss per year.
They were just preparing everyone for the inevitable.
You won’t get a coherent energy policy until the politicians, the civil servants, the media prostitutes and the green numpties are the first to lose their supplies when their policies cause blackouts.
Let’s cut off Ed Miliband’s gas, electricity this winter. Make him spend a winter being cold.
Do the same to every single Labour MP, every single Green Party MP, every Tory that supports Net Zero, the entire First Division Association and every media employee in the UK that earns more than £30k a year.
Don’t have any sympathy for them.
Send them home to get cold with their families.
Just move back to coal
Well, tbf, this would surely be the first time ever for the GroanAid to publish anything sensible. Must be wrong then!
Totally mad.
My foremost concern is for all the people that will suffer/die this winter when the inevitable blackout occurs and lasts for days.
Britain needs to wake up, biomass, wind and solar are not green, they are not clean, they are expensive and they won’t make a lick of difference to our climate. Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators and remove all wind, solar and biomass from the grid.
Urgent call to Brit “hate” police! This is clearly a conspiracy between Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage and is a “threat to democracy.”