From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Freddie Sayers is joined by energy analyst Kathryn Porter to break down the National Grid numbers and find out how Net Zero might cause blackouts by 2030.
This discussion will be archived in WUWT Climate TV, a collection of over six hundred videos, featuring new interviews and analysis, and covering dozens of media sources discussing, debating and analyzing the latest in climate science, climate politics, and energy policy, including topics concerning temperature, sea level, polar bears, ocean acidification, extreme weather, censorship, wild fires, and more.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
We keep talking about them but they never come…
And where exactly are you in the UK that makes you so well informed, Nick?
OK, where is the blackout?
You don’t answer a question with a question…
Must do better.
You do, when your goal is to change the subject.
Eh? How close do we need to get, Nick? In a sane world we would not be talking about such an eventuality.
Where area all the climate catastrophes that have been predicted by you and your ilk?
I think paying 1300 pound a MWH was a sign that the National Grid was getting desperate for power.
We keep talking about how renewable resources are much cheaper, but the lower prices never come.
Mainly because energy costs rocket when you have to pay gas power stations 2 million an hour to come online because the wind has dropped. (Who could have seen there would be days where it wasn’t very windy? Nobody….)
‘We keep talking about them but they never come’
Did the BBC or Channel 4 or Sky talk about the near blackout last Wednesday?
Actually, Sky did, although they never did explain how 3GW of wind power and 0 GW of solar power could add up to 45 GW of demand.
https://news.sky.com/story/power-grid-operator-scrambles-to-avert-blackout-threat-13285474
This time they seem to have got away with it. There were a couple of small plant outages which, had they happened a couple of hours earlier, would have led to blackouts. So it was very close – it was a near miss. And there were blackouts a couple of years ago in the summer, as the piece explains. So that is one answer to your question. But that is not really the important question.
The question is whether their net zero in generation plan as currently conceived is possible, or whether it will lead to blackouts in the 2026-8 time period. The plan at the moment is to have 90GW wind, 40GW solar, very small amounts of nuclear (since the stations are to be closed down in a couple of years), some gas, not clear how much, since the current plant is approaching end of life and there don’t seem to be any plans to replace it.
Demand last week peaked at 47GW. With the move to heat pumps and EVs it will probably rise to 55-60GW.
On a cold winter evening the solar will produce nothing, and the wind during one of the usual calms will produce less than 10GW for hours or days at a time.
If you think this is going to work without blackouts, say where you think the remaining 50GW is going to come from/ Maybe 10GW from interconnect? That leaves 40GW. Where is it going to come from on that cold, calm January evening in 2027 or 2028?
Running a national power system, you cannot do it on a near miss basis. You have to have a margin of safety. Just as with air traffic control it is not enough to say that we have not had a crash yet. That is not the question. The question is whether the system is safe and robust and fit for purpose. Right now its getting by, but its in the dangerous margin. Two or three years from now, failures will be very likely, just about certain if they carry on as they are talking now.
But if I am wrong about this, show me. Just explain where the 40GW is going to come from. For a full week, too. Not just an hour or two.
What an excellent response!
“Maybe 10GW from interconnect? “
If France starts closing nuclear plant that may be very wishful thinking.
It’s fun to play with fire.
I knew a bloke who ran his car with a nearly empty tank. He said it was better for economy. I never accepted a lift from him as he also ran out of fuel 2 or 3 times a year.
Technically it is, however like global warming, the difference is nearly impossible to measure. The benefit does not outweigh the risk.
The benefit is lost anyway, in frequent fill ups, if you value your time appropriately.
I know a guy who doesn’t get his car serviced. He laughs at me for getting mine serviced regularly, says it’s a waste of money.
His 10 year old car is now kaput. He says ‘Nothing lasts more than 10 years these days, anyway.’
My car is 12 years old, and drives like new. Starts 1st time, every time. I fully expect it to last at least another 10 years. He’s also had to borrow it several times when his car was being fixed.
He still reckons that servicing his car is a waste of money!
He’s right. We have a 2006 Kia Sportage, once the warranty ran out servicing stopped, it runs just as well today as when we bought it.
If he’s right, how come his car is niw trash, and broke down catastrophically every few years?
I think your kia, or use of it, might be an outlier.
What do you mean here by “servicing” – regular oil and filter changes, changing the pads and discs ? If he’s not done any of that, he’s an idiot, but its about all a modern car really needs – you do plugs every 100K on my Mitsu, you do transmission fluid on the same interval. Mine needed a new battery – after 125,000 miles
“We keep talking about them but they never come…”
You either didn’t watch the video….or you’re being wilfully ignorant, probably both.
Says the man falling past the 5th floor window.
Every year, the situation gets more precarious, and the measures being taken to prevent blackouts become more severe.
But they haven’t happened yet, so there is nothing to worry about.
“So far, not bad at all!”
Kinda like all the apocalyptic predictions made by “climate scientists”, eh, Nick?
Ouch! That must hurt!
Well, is it?
No, because this is actually going to happen.
While I rarely agree with Nick, I am concerned that after a decade or so of warnings, the new Prophets of “blackout” doom, are turning people off to the reality of energy poverty. While occasional blackouts can be serious, they can also usually be managed. No-one is going to change their mind about climate change based on constant warnings of blackouts which are usually small, local, and short lived. This isn’t a message that resonates with the general public. Climate realists are losing this message war and like the Kamala Harris democrats, after the recent election, many don’t seem to have learned much about what they are doing wrong.
No-one is going to change their mind about climate change based on constant warnings of catastrophic sea level rise, morer and biggerer hurricanes, flooding rains and desiccating droughts either. The significant difference is blackouts, even short lived, are real and have a real effect on people.
“The significant difference is blackouts, even short lived, are real and have a real effect on people.”
While I do agree with you, my point is that many are tired of a war between Prophets of climate doom vs Prophets of blackout doom. I have followed this issue for over 15 years, and I now skip over posting about blackouts. After over a decade, until enough people actually experience them, it’s the old story of the boy who cried wolf.
How do you know any blackout is likely to be small, local, and short-lived?
“How do you know any blackout is likely to be small, local, and short-lived?”
When they aren’t “small, local, and short-lived,” people will start paying attention. Until then this is not a message that is resonating with the general public. We need to figure out what messaging works; being a prophet of blackout doom doesn’t seem to be changing many minds.
This is not about climate change.
Its about a quite separate and independent question: energy planning.
People can believe what they want about climate, it makes no difference to the key consideration in energy planning. It is not possible to run a modern industrial society on wind and solar. Whether its warming, cooling, or somewhere in between. Whether there is or is not a climate crisis.
Makes no difference, either case you are not going to manage a modern economy on wind and solar. The reason is simple: intermittency. There is no practical or affordable solution to it. Batteries are too expensive, too risky, and you can’t build enough wind and solar to charge them when you have drawn them down. And there is not enough manufacturing capacity to make enough of them anyway.
This is the point to insist on. Wind and solar, if installed in small quantities in an otherwise dispatchable system, will be a waste of money and effort, but the system as a whole will work. It won’t lower emissions, but it will work. Take wind and solar up to the ninetieth percentile, and the system will not work.
In the popular hysteria its usually assumed that if you can show there is aa climate crisis, the case for wind and solar follows. No it doesn’t. You have to assess wind and solar on their merits as generating technologies, and they are not fit for purpose for present demand. Still less can they supply the increased demand due to EVs, heat pumps and now AI. Look at the Tech sector. They are all worried about power. How many of them are building wind farms? None. They wouild rather risk the untried technology of small nukes. That tells you all you need to know.
“This is not about climate change. Its about a quite separate and independent question: energy planning.”
I’m an EE and have been following this issue for over 15 years. Any message has to consider it’s audience, and if the audience is the “climate realist” choir, than yea, it is a valid and compelling message. If the intent is to change the hearts and minds of the general public (and voter), they are no longer listening.
I don’t think the general public and most voters are listening on climate change – actually, there is little sign that they ever have.
But they definitely are listening on the price of energy, on electric cars, on heat pumps. They are also listening on the absurdities of the Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil protests.
The thing that is sinking the climate movement is that wind and solar do not work, and that the economic consequences of net zero are proving disastrous.
The plain fact is that on Wedensday a week ago the UK has peak demand of 47GW, and Katherine Porter summarizes:
Both my bottom up and top down analyses have yielded essentially the same result – about 500 MW of margin at the peak on 8 January. On top of this there was about 700 MW of reserve. This means that the single largest infeed loss of 1,400 MW could not have been covered.
This happened because of one of the usual winter calms, caused as usual by a blocking high.
This is not a ‘war between Prophets of climate doom vs Prophets of blackout doom’. This is not being a prophet of blackout doom. It is just pointing out the real facts about the current energy generation system in the UK. Its also drawing the conclusion which is obvious in the light of those facts: continuation of present policies will lead to blackouts. You cannot safely run the present system with these low margins.
To take action which will increase demand from here while also reducing secure supply will lead to blackouts. This is not doomery. Its just pointing out reality.
I recall the great MRSA epidemic in British hospitals. It was really simple: if you do not make the staff wash their hands you will continue to infect patients. And there was resistance of course to the compulsion, and people came in to hospitals and were infected with MRSA. A whole lot of irrelevant stuff said to avoid confronting the issue.
There is no way around this. Present energy policy is not working and will not work. This is the issue to focus on. Its becoming increasingly generally realized and written about, and its the issue which is going to impact us all before the government’s chosen out of a hat net zero date of 2030. All people who see this have to do is, keep pointing it out.
When your relative came home worse than when he went in, and infected with MRSA by your local hospital, what you had to do was shout loudly. And eventually, kicking and screaming, they did learn. Too late for some however.
PMHinSC,
with narrow margins at time of stress and with a fair amount of conventional generation lost and with it, it’s inertia which stabilises frequency the grid is more susceptible to frequency deviation, and the more there is a likelyhood of exceeding the limit.
What is unmeasurable or predictable is the occurance of a fault or faults. It is a bit of luck as to their effect and it doesn’t take much for a trip to escalate and drag down frequency with further trips.
To put it another way, it’s very much unknown and runing with low margins of spare capacity makes a subsequent partial grid restart so much harder and time consuming.
What must be remembered is that re energising has to be done slowly and that renewables are not able to assist as they follow frequency and do not support it in such a situation. No they will not be short lived for a full restore even of a small part of the grid.
Do you really think that that big blue area in the power sources chart representing CCGT’s ~50% of energy generation can be replaced by wind and solar without massive grid destabilization? When the available reserve margin falls well below the capacity of most of your largest generators an unexpected failure of a single source could well collapse the entire grid.
The whole point of electricity supply planning is to have enough reserve capacity that blackouts are extremely rare – in other words that the LOLP is essentially zero. When the LOLP climbs above 20% as in this recent UK example, the system is in serious trouble already. Her point is that this can only get worse over the next 5 years as ageing nuclear and gas-fired plants are retired. For a modern society increasingly dependent on electricity non-zero LOLP is far to close the edge of collapse (especially in the winter).
“The whole point of electricity supply planning is to have enough reserve capacity that blackouts are extremely rare”
Yes. And apart from transmission failures (storms etc), they are extremely rare.
Until they’re not. Which is clearly outlined…
They started at least two years ago.
That reminds me of something….
Oh, yes! Every single CAGW prediction!
Nice one, Nick.
Like record temperatures, fires etc?
No, not records whatever.
De-industrialisation news…
It’s more good news for Rachel from Accounts as December’s retail sales took a sharper dive than expected, with businesses and consumers still grappling with the fallout of Rachel’s tax raid right before Christmas. h/t Guido Fawkes.
A recession will doubtless turbo charge the process.
BP to cut 4,700 jobs and 3,000 contractor roles to help save £1.6bn
Oil company to lose 5% of its staff in effort to cut costs amid shareholder worries over green energy strategy
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/16/bp-to-cut-4700-jobs-3000-contractor-roles-costs
Modular reactors…
another year’s delay in a UK government competition that has pushed Rolls-Royce’s earliest date for a new reactor to 2032 or 2033
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/15/a-viable-business-rolls-royce-banking-on-success-of-small-modular-reactors
Why have Britain’s energy costs soared
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/10/britain-energy-costs-labour-power-plants-uk-cold-weather
Because unreliables just don’t work and there’s no desire whatsoever to bring in Rolls-Royce’s reactors. Nuclear isn’t – in their minds – an acceptable source, even though in their terms it is green. The trouble is it is a solution that works. Hence that delay.
Cheap energy liberates populations from control. Ther is nothing people who seek power fear more than other people having it.
The previous Labour government was content to kick nuclear into the long grass, so nothing new here.
I have every faith that Rolls Royce will make it work. Too much has been invested, and it will likely be the only economic solution.
As for safety, I trust them with mine and my family’s lives almost every time I fly. I see no reason not to extend that trust.
Nice to see Kathryn getting some airtime.
WE can only hope and pray for blackouts sooner rather than later while we still have enough money left to build some nukes
Probably too late for nukes, unless and until SMRs become a thing.
About the best we can hope for is that wind/solar allows us to stretch the remaining life of the gas plants until a reliable alternative (SMR) can be found.
I like the sound of some of Korean reactors talked about in the video. Up and running elsewhere in about seven years and on dubget sounds almost too good to be true to these UK ears.
It is a truism, nothing comes in on budget in the UK.
I recall that some Japanese companies and I’m sure other countries as well have SMRs. It may be that it’s only if you want to wait for Rolls-Royce to design a new one that it becomes a problem.
While your message seems innocent enough, hoping and praying for blackouts is not exactly humane when one considers the lives negatively impacted and the death toll that could result.
We should hope and pray that sanity is re-established and engineers go forward using the right tool for the right job (complements to Mr. Scott).
SMR components and complete smaller designs (Micro and Nano) could be built in the USA and transported by ship. The bigger problem is the political challenges. The British seem to be determined to legislate themselves into an Islamist run hell-scape.
As long as adequate energy provision is conceived as a sin rather than a necessary blessing to all then we know that reality has been successfully blacked out by misplaced virtue signalling – be a selfishly warm baddie or a cold goodie corpse..
A week without wind here in Liverpool. Nice walk on the coastal paths with views on two off-shore wind farms, the nearest with some 70 turbines. All at a standstill, not a hint of motion. Them doing nothing is being paid for by us. Not only that, because the temperature is just above freezing most of the day, each windmill draws electricity from the network to keep the turbines at an operational temperature and ready to go, all the time.
The network interconnectors to Norway and France were doing overtime at the limit of capacity.
There was a few hour blackout in Cambridge.
Was there?
Funny how that sort of thing is deemed un-newsworthy
Funny… yes…. irony involved.
Attention Nick Stokes! Blackout in Cambridge!
Still confident blackouts will never happen in the UK?
Of course he is.
No doubt, when they become regular, he will say that they’re not 100% dark, therefore cannot be called ‘blackouts’.
Politicising things
Just when you think our energy secretary can’t stoop any lower, he accuses his opponents of turning the net-zero debate into a “culture war… – Daily Telegraph
No Left Turn Ahead
It is a culture war. It is a war about having a culture or “you will have nothing but you will be happy”
Neolithic culture was still culture.
True. I could have said modern culture versus the have nothing culture.
If we look at this Nullschool link we see that the UK is not getting really cold arctic air at the present time.
What happens when the UK gets an extreme arctic blast?
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2025/01/17/1300Z/wind/isobaric/500hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=-43.04,26.91,486
Hell freezes over?
It gets cold(er) in the UK!
Novacastrians might put on a Jersey.
Scotsmen might start wearing something under their kilts.
Will Blackouts Come to Britain? They’re certainly committed to FAFO.
Dealing with the risk of blackouts is simple. Just make electricity so expensive people decide not to use it.
They are trying that here in the UK already. Many elderly people and families on low incomes regularly heat only one or two rooms in winter to keep the costs down.
In 2023 the Government estimated 13% of households in England (3.17m people) were in fuel poverty.
The charity National Energy Action estimates 6.1m households in England and Scotland are now in fuel poverty , up from 4.5 million in 2021.
That would actually be funny, if not true.
If GB continues down the current path to Net Zero then, yes, there will be blackouts. In a situation where you have dispatchable generation system restoration, while tedious and difficult, can be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time. However, in a system where there is little to no dispatchable generation, system restoration is totally dependent on the intermittent generation that caused the blackout in the first place. Restoration may take days or weeks. To avoid this situation, it would appear that dispatchable generation equal to the system peak would be required to be held in reserve. Not very cost affect it would seem.
Also, I found Kathryn’s reference to system inertia and frequency control to be spot on. This is a critical factor that not many non-power system folks understand.
My anti-nuclear wind & solar advocate relatives in the Bay Area of California and in several locations in New York State don’t have the slightest idea of what the technical issues are, let alone what the economic issues are, of a transition to Net Zero for power generation.
They swallow without question the propaganda that wind and solar are the cheapest means for producing electricity. They are confident that the regulatory authorities and the power utilities will not allow the power grid to fail. Convincing them otherwise is a fool’s errand.
As for the wildfires in California? Climate change is the culprit, not gross mismangement of the fire danger risk by civil and corporate authorities.
Disclaimer : I was too busy “playing” with my spreadsheets to take the 45 minutes needed to watch the video. I have no idea how much of the following is covered therein.
In this previous WUWT post I provided a link to NESO’s “Clean Power 2030” webpage, especially the “Data Workbook” (Excel) spreadsheet.
The following graph (if I copy the URL correctly …) summarises their options for the GB electricity grid in 2030.
In order to investigate the challenges many aspects must be considered.
One of these is to see how much more “fossil fuels” contributors to the grid generate than “renewables” — i.e. only “Wind + Solar” — during wind droughts / dunkelflautes.
Note that these “multiples” can be calculated without any assumptions about how many wind turbines and solar panels may be installed in the future.
In a second phase, for a given increase in “Wind + Solar” capacity, the amount of “Storage” that would be required to completely eliminate the fossil-fuel contribute in the past can be worked out, but this requires use of cumulative calculations.
The results of a very “quick and dirty” set of calculations using “daily sums / maxima” from 1/1/2020 to 31/12/2024 is given below.
They show that the “recent worst-case” sequence of “Demand + Weather” combinations occurred during the last 5 or 6 weeks (35 to 40 days) of 2022, requiring about 4 Tera-Watt-hours of “Storage” along with the 80 GW of Wind + 47 GW of Solar in NESO’s “Further Flex and Renewables (FF&R)” scenario.
OK, let’s zoom in to December 2022, switch to the “30-minute Elexon + NESO data” that I usually use, and see what we get with NESO’s FF&R scenario.
Q4 2022 capacities : ~27 GW Wind + ~14.5 GW Solar
NESO FF&R capacities : 80 GW Wind + 47 GW Solar
80/27 ~= 2.96, 47/14.5 ~= 3.24, (80 + 47) / (27 + 14.5) ~= 3.06 …
So NESO’s FF&R scenario triples the “capacity” from Q4 2022 to 2030, and adds 150 GWh of “Storage”.
How much would that have reduced fossil-fuel generation 49 or 50 months ago ?
The “peak multiplier” of (just over) 40 on the 28th of November is almost covered by 150 GWh of storage … almost !
The second-highest peak, however, on the 11th of December occurs long after the “Storage” has already been “used up” (by the evening of the 8th of December).
What’s that you say ?
You can’t see what I’m talking about with those Y-axis scales ? …
And that is a very “cluttered / busy” graph ? …
Hmmmmmmm, you might have some valid points there.
How about the following instead, losing the (purely theoretical) “semi-infinite battery” and “multiplier” curves and adjusting the Y-axes accordingly ?
Here you can more clearly see 150 GWh of “Storage” shaving the front edges off the “wind droughts”, and almost eliminating the 22nd-23rd of December “spike” … but you still need a hell of a lot of “unabated gas / CCGT” from the 28th of November to the 2nd of December, and from the 9th to the 16th of December.
As the NESO FF&R scenario is “a nice round number” of three times the Q4 2022 (capacity) numbers, let’s see what combinations of “Wind + Solar + Storage” would be required to fulfil the stated goal of “zero (CO2) emissions” for my “worst-case Demand + Weather” sequence at the end of 2022.
The given “x3” increase in wind and solar installations would require almost 4 TWh of “storage” … clearly economically unrealistic, and technically “very difficult” as well.
The given “150 GWh of storage” would require multiplying “Wind + Solar” by (approximately) 18.25 instead of the proposed “x3” … that’s (just over) six times more “expensive”…
It looks like the “best” compromise is to triple all of NESO’s numbers — wind, solar, and storage — which implies “only” tripling the total cost, ~40 billion pounds, as well …
Good luck getting that past “Rachel from accounts” !
I have been saying similar for years now, albeit without the graphics etc. Any engineer can see the problem very clearly once outlined. Politicians are completely blind to it.
Most normal, average intelligence and educated people can understand it, given half an hour of intense discussion. They are almost all completely overwhelmed once they realise the ramifications, however, and compare it to the obvious lack of understanding of politicians.
Don’t forget that most ‘storage’ mechanisms and most ‘renewable’ energy sources need to be replaced every 10 years or so. That’s a 10% of total rolling annual cost. Forever.
I’m not sure if you’ve discussed the extensive infrastructure costs as well. These are just now being considered, after decades of wishful thinking. It’s like watching a slow-motion train crash.
How long would it take to store 4TWH of energy, given that it has to come from ‘excess’ electricity production and to store a usable 4TWH of energy might take output of 8TWH of ‘excess’ electricity because of inefficiencies in storing and then using the stored energy?
I’m sure that 4TWH of energy can be released within a reasonably short time scale.
Normally it’s called an explosion, however.
How long is a piece of string ?
Given 80 GW of Wind + 47 GW of Solar my simulation, which is limited to only replacing the “sum of fossil fuels” contribution, was recharging a 150 GWh “big (Li-ion) battery” in 12 to 18 hours (see the graph at the end of my third post above).
15 hours x (4000 GWh / 150 GWh) = 400 hours, or almost 17 days.
NB : That “recharge rate” was during periods with the dashed-green “extra wind and solar” line barely above the blue “fossil fuels to be replaced” line.
.
Look at the gradients in the “cluttered / busy” graph — at the end of my second post — for an idea of how fast “storage” could theoretically get (re-)filled with 80 GW of Wind + 47 GW of Solar in the weather conditions of December 2022.
Removing the “inflexion” on the 22nd and 23rd of December it would have taken around 7 days of “optimal” conditions — i.e. with the dashed-green line in the 30-40 GW range, well above the blue line — to store 4TWh of energy with 80 GW of Wind + 47 GW of Solar.
Excellent, excellent, excellent. This is exactly what I have been going on about. I didn’t see this coming from the Brits but they absolutely hit it out of the park. God bless them. Plain and simple language without all the scientific and technical gibberish, laying things out exactly as they are not what the lying cheating government chooses to force feed us. The people at WUWT, CO2 Coalition, CFACT, Heartland and all the other good people on our side could easily do what these two have done. Our audience is the common guy, to hell with the experts and politicians.
Business opportunity in Britain, candlestick maker.