From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Britain remains “critically vulnerable” to future energy crises, experts have warned.
The country’s high dependency on gas for heating and electricity generation has left us more exposed than other European countries to swings in market prices, according to a commission set up by Energy UK, Citizens Advice and the Confederation of British Industry.
The report was published hours after a backstop system designed to prevent blackouts was mobilised for the first time in two years as Britain’s power grid battled low winds and nuclear outages.
The surprise notice for the capacity market, which sends 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 to bring online back-up systems 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However, the notice was later withdrawn just after 2pm.
Tuesday’s report from the Energy Crisis Commission found that Britain was “dangerously underprepared” for the 2021 and 2022 energy crisis, when the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up the price of gas.
At one point, before a massive £150bn intervention was pledged by the Government, a typical household could have seen its annual bill rise from around £2,000 per year to £3,500 per year.
In the event, costs were capped at £2,500 per year. But even this had “catastrophic” consequences for poorer households, the commission found, with nine in 10 households cutting back their energy use and 7.5m falling into fuel poverty.
At the same time, one in 10 businesses were forced to temporarily cease operations to shield themselves from the eye-watering cost of energy.
The commission found the impact of price rises could have been cushioned if more homes were properly insulated and the UK had more gas storage capacity.
They also said the Government spent more money than it needed to because of poorly designed support schemes and a lack of investment over many years in infrastructure such as gas storage.
In a report, the commission said: “Keeping bills down for everyone over the coming years and decades means reducing our dependence on gas and its volatile pricing; increasing the production and distribution of clean homegrown power; and making more of our homes and businesses energy efficient.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/14/blackout-prevention-plan-activated-britain
Quite why Citizens Advice have co-wrote this report is beyond me.
And none of them seem to have realised the contradiction of calling for more renewable energy, when it was the intermittency of wind power which triggered the blackout warning earlier this week.
They recommend more insulation, but have not bothered to do a cost/benefit analysis to see whether it would actually be worth it. Nor have they said who should pay for it.
By far the biggest factor behind our high dependency on gas is the forced shutdown of all of our coal power capacity. It is still not too late to build a new fleet of ultra clean coal power plants, just as Germany has been doing. It is worth noting that in Germany coal accounts for 16% of primary energy consumption – here it is just 3%. Conversely gas makes up 33% of our total energy, compared to 24% in Germany.
They call for more gas storage, which seems illogical when Net Zero will shut gas down anyway. In any event the value of the Rough storage facility has always been overstated; at a capacity of 100 bcf, it would only hold enough to supply demand for about 16 days. It would have made no difference at all to gas prices in 2021/22.
Finally it should be pointed out that even during 2022, when gas prices spiked, we were still paying out CfD subsidies to renewables. In other words renewable energy was still more expensive than gas power.
In any event, you don’t plan your energy policy around the off chance that there might be a war somewhere in the world, sometime in the future.
https://dp.lowcarboncontracts.uk/dataset/actual-cfd-generation-and-avoided-ghg-emissions
Gas prices may be volatile, but renewables will leave us with permanently higher prices.
FOOTNOTE
At least Jim Watson admits that bills will rise if we invest in more renewables:
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And why exactly do you have Gas Price Shocks?
Could it be that you have made yourself dependent on unfriendly nations to supply your energy fuel rather than developing domestic sources??
Why do you have ‘unfriendly’ nations?
Ask Putin or Xi Jinping or Kim
It’s called negotiating…Biden certainly won’t. He has not once tried to work a peace deal in Ukraine but he has plenty of our money for them 😉
Its called making yourself dependent on foreign adversaries
Gas Price Shocks occur when demand steps up to high levels and creates shortages.
Usually supply and demand are like the tides, rising and falling at moderate to slow rates.
A step function always creates transients with the first transient typically going high.
Like I said, when you have insufficient domestic supplies and depend on unfriendly nations
California creates its own issues by demanding (no pun intended) all sorts of special gasoline “blends” for different times of year, which places additional strain on already inadequate refinery capacity.
I apologize. I misread your post to ask WHAT are Gas Price Shocks.
My bad.
They’re not gas price shocks any more. On Monday, NESO was busy paying up to £1030/MWh on up to 5GW to unwind interconnector trades and persuade coal to start up in the Netherlands and Ireland. So we were paying warm-up costs via the interconnector trades.
https://timera-energy.com/blog/first-capacity-market-notice-of-winter-2024-25-issued/
Map of day ahead prices at 18:00BST
We have nameplate Wind Capacity of 30Gkw which can produce on windless days virtually nothing, well 2x or 3x nothing still multiples up to nothing. We need base load generation, not only on Goldilocks windy days generation, as too much wind is as bad as no wind.
Simple maths, multiplication with zero allways results in zero
NOT in the Mili-Brain, of course!
Prices follow the divide by zero rule.
1+1=2 How do you feel about that? (New Math)
You do not need to get the correct answer, per new math, but only need to know how the process works.
Yep, if you need 50GW of supply to meet demand and you depend on Wind to do it without reliable back-up, and wind drops to 5% capacity, you would need 1000GW installed capacity to allow for the drop and still meet demand
Then, on those rare days when Wind can supply the 50MW demand using 50MW of wind turbine capacity you have a 95% overcapacity or a 95% idle asset
Ummm…change MW to GW
50GW and 1000GW
I don’t understand. Why don’t need 20X as much to meet 50GW demand?
The CAB (citizens advice bureau)?
We have plenty of gas, they can’t be unaware of that.
Is this another conspiracy theory coming true? Didn’t Trump foretell this happening in one of his ramblings?
Everything Trump says is a conspiracy theory until some time goes by and it turns out he was right. But by then no one remembers it was Trump who said it.
Build more wind! A fun fact. From the EIA “U.S. electricity generation from wind turbines decreased for the first time since the mid-1990s in 2023 despite the addition of 6.2 gigawatts (GW) of new wind capacity last year”. So yeah, add more wind turbines as if that will definitely solve the problem.
No one apparently considered that harvesting the energy in wind might reduce available wind energy.
Hmmm…Wind Stilling
Yet another side effect of Climate Change™ Policy
And no one gave a moment’s thought to the potential effect on the weather of extracting energy from the wind.
Which is probably bigger than any effect on the weather from rising CO2 levels (regardless of source).
They also went on to say
“Slower wind speeds than normal affected wind generation in 2023 especially in the first half of the year when wind generation dropped 14% compared to 2022″
But hey the wind is always blowing somewhere we are told.
Has anyone ever wondered what happens when too much energy is taken out of the wind currents? Does it disrupt climate and rain patterns?
Gas price shocks:
Stop extracting oil gas and coal
Stop (then start, then stop) natural gas development of known supplies
Divest from your own country’s oil and gas suppliers
Foment a proxy war with a gas supplier, to take place adjacent to the gas suppliers’ shipping ports
Have your allies destroy their own gas pipeline to the supplier, blame it on the proxy
Close your own coal, gas, nuclear, and biofuel power plants
Contract with supposed allies for highest priced electrical energy
Accept your other supposed ally’s refusal to share their own excess gas supply
Shock! Quel suprise! It’s not like it was all deliberate. No one would actually try to take down a country that wasn’t politically going their way, would they?
With Governments only interested in fulfilling the requirements of “being popular and agenda following” we are never going to have proper energy management in the UK until our growing charlatan mainstream politicians are made to pay for their monstrous stupidity for multi-decades now. Until the truth is revealed and told we will remain this way.
We are sitting on a fortunes worth of clean natural gas – much superior in greenness and efficiency to either solar or wind – and yet we still build these ugly useless environmental monuments to a political movement that doesn’t have one ounce of sensibility within it or supporting it.
You can’t accuse Labour of being popular; Reform is polling higher and it only took 100 days.
Remember, remember the 5th of November…
Is there a large quantity of NG in the UK? Just curious- have no idea. If so, I recommend get out the pitchforks- nothing else will open their eyes.
Don’t forget the torches.
Story tip
University of Michigan – again.
Latin plant names could be racist, warns University of Michigan
Botanical gardens should be careful not to erase ‘other forms of knowing’, says inclusivity document
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/10/17/latin-plant-names-racist-suggests-university-michigan/
Other forms of knowing?
It’s good to know what you know so that you know what is worth knowing.
Kamala? Is that you??
Go Spartans!
Of course. American Indian myths and superstitions are other ways of knowing.
The is a new miracle energy source available. Just dump it on the ground and it keeps for years. Rainwater actually improves the energy output and reduces pollution. Can heat houses and drive the largest power plants. Found alonside the road in many locations. Available in all colors as long as they are black.
How many politicians have offshore family trusts to harvest the profits in their “mistakes”
Politicians with their foundations, all structured to convert income into donations into inheritance and avoid the prying eye of the taxman.
Why not give taxpayers the same break. That isn’t income. It is a charitable donation your employer is giving you. Your charity is providing food and shelter to the great grand children of your grandparents.
As the late, great philosopher Waylon Jennings once observed:
“Did you ever notice that the roads in Hazzard County are always being worked on but that they never get fixed?”
Whatever happened to long-term contracts?
People in government are so stupid it takes my breath away. The more wind and solar penetrate the market the higher energy prices. Wake up wind and solar are the problem not the solution.
Depends on what your problem is and what the desired solution looks like.
I’ll take “What is autocorrelation?” for $800, Alex
Keep voting for extreme Leftists and expect different results.
It can only be deliberate. No other explanation holds water.