Britain’s rush to Net Zero could leave it vulnerable to months-long blackouts, as reliance on intermittent renewables strains the grid, escalating costs and jeopardising energy security. The Telegraph has more.
The grid operator has raised concerns that the switch from dependable gas to intermittent wind and solar power would “reduce network stability” and said the cost to taxpayers of funding measures to prevent the system crashing was set to “increase significantly” to £1 billion a year.
Meanwhile, the global energy watchdog has sounded the alarm over the “premature retirement” of gas power plants “without adequate replacements”.
It can also be revealed that Government officials have admitted it would take Britain “several months” to fully recover from a nationwide electricity outage.
Spain and Portugal were hit by huge power cuts last month, which experts have said were likely to have been caused by their reliance on renewable energy. Ministers have played down the prospect of such a blackout happening in the UK, insisting Britain has a “highly resilient energy network”.
It comes after a power cut at Heathrow in March, which shut the airport for 24 hours, raised questions about the reliability of the electricity network.
The National System Energy Operator (Neso), which runs the grid, published a report in that same month, which warned of an increased risk of “outages”. It set out that the reduction in “synchronous” power generation, such as from gas and nuclear, in favour of renewables “reduces network stability”. …
In response, Britain is having to invest large amounts of cash in “stability network services”, such as mass battery storage, to back up the system. Neso said the cost of these would “increase significantly by 2030, up to an estimated £1 billion a year”, citing modelling by Imperial College London. …
A report compiled by the Cabinet Office earlier this year found that the risk of a nationwide blackout was “low”, but that the effects would be devastating.
Under such a scenario “all consumers without backup generators would lose their mains electricity supply instantaneously and without warning”. This would “cause significant and widespread disruption to public services provisions, businesses and households, as well as loss of life”.
The Government’s National Risk Register found that it would take “a few days” to get a “skeletal network” of power back up and running.
It added: “Full restoration could take up to seven days, however, depending on the cause of failure and damage, restoration of critical services may take several months.”
Worth reading in full.
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Britain is getting exactly what it has been asking for. Congratulations. Now wake up. Wind and solar don’t work everybody knows that. Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Remove all wind and solar from the grid. It is that easy.
The Reform Party has pledged to do this. Things may change in 2029.
A possible political crisis scenario for the UK is starting to emerge.
The recent English local elections resulted in very heavy wins for Reform. But they were not held in the whole country. Local elections are held on a staggered schedule, and many were not due this year, and of those that are due, many were postponed on the excuse that a local government reorganization is under way in them.
This means that a year from now, May 2026, more local elections will be held. Suppose Reform continues to win heavily. Suppose it also keeps its increasingly militant approach to blocking all green initiatives in its jurisdiction – whether they be wind farms or solar farms or pylons.
The next national elections for the UK will not have to be held until August 2029. They can be held earlier at the discretion of the Prime Minister of the day, who triggers them by asking the King for a dissolution of Parliament, but Starmer isn’t going to do this as long as there is a good chance it will lead to a Reform landslide. Which the polls are now indicating.
So you can imagine a scenario in 2026-29 where there is a radical split between Westminster and the national government and the great majority of the local councils, with the councils acting in systematic way to block the energy initiatives of the center.
This has the potential to be a constitutional and a political crisis. Not to mention an energy crisis! I can’t think of another case where there has been unified party based resistance by a party with overwhelming local majorities to a national government with a huge Commons majority.
How likely? Hard to say. At the moment its just an emerging possibility. But depending on how Reform gets on with its local net zero opposition, and how radical it gets with that, it could get real quite fast.
In 2019, a Tory landslide led to a less-than-competent government. Then, in 2024, there was a Labour landslide, followed by an even less competent government. Now, People are predicting a Reform landslide in 2029. Can Reform form a competent government? Or will there be a cycle of landslide elections and less-than-competent governments until the country decides that it would be better off without any of the present pseudo-politicians sitting in parliament?
Lincolnshire will be an interesting test case. I suspect that the Labour government will quickly drop any notion of devolved decision making and attempt to bludgeon through consent for solar farms on prime farmland, just as Rayner has already been looking to circumvent local objections to housing.
Several large solar farms in Lincolnshire were approved last year and already this year a further 7 have been approved covering some 10,000 acres
As mad Ed continues to go further along the Net Zero road to oblivion, I can see a great opportunity for a surge in Reform votes at the next election.
Imagine it’s the week of the polling day in 2029 and suddenly, there are outages in parts of the country, a spokesperson for the National Grid says these are isolated incidents (or cyber attacks, whatever) and power will be restored quickly, but it doesn’t, France has a problem with some of its nuclear power generation and shuts down its interconnectors making it harder to keep the grid stable. Weather conditions reduce solar/wind generation output until bingo, no electricity. The government suspends the election but it will just delay the inevitable votes going to any political party who abandons Net Zero i.e. the Reform party.
How can a country without a constitution have a ‘constitutional crisis’?
Its an amusing question but a little thought will show that its in fact easier to have a constitutional crisis under the British constitution than under written ones such as the US.
There is a British Constitution, but, unusually, its an unwritten one. Its similar to the Common Law. Its a series of court decisions and accepted practices and relationships.
Under the US Constitution the powers of Congress, President and Judiciary are well defined. Its a matter of interpreting what is written. In the UK you have a series of court rulings which may or may not cover the matter you’re concerned about. A constitutional crisis arises when there is a dispute about the power or role of one of the main constitutional bodies – courts, monarchy, Lords, Commons – including local government bodies.
An example: Does the Prime Minister have the power to advise the monarch to prorogue Parliament whenever he wishes? The court’s answer given to this, when Johnson was PM and tried it, was no. But a substantial body of opinion thought this was an erroneous ruling, and that the Bill of Rights of 1688 makes it impossible to take such an action to judicial review.
A crisis would have occurred had Johnson pronounced that the ruling was inapplicable, the court had no jurisdiction (because of the Bill of Rights), and advised the monarch to prorogue regardless. Its not at all clear what would happen next or who has the authority to decide.
The possible constitutional crisis in the present instance would be if a substantial majority of local councils, acting as a unified body and being of one political party, refuse to implement, or block, a decision by Parliament, Do they have any such power or right? I don’t know, its never happened before, and its not written anywhere what to do. Jail the councils, one after the other? Courts would doubtless rule on it, and their rulings and their jurisdiction would be disputed.
You may think its a funny way to run a country, and it is, but its lasted since 1688, arguably maybe earlier, and its survived the acquisition and relinquishing of the Empire, variations in suffrage, European wars, two world wars, the industrial revolution. It must have something going for it.
Actually its 1689, the Bill of Rights. The Glorious Revolution which gave rise to it was 1688.
Neither glorious, nor a revolution. (Quoting my English wife.)
Britain is getting exactly what it has been asking for.
Is it?
We call it imposition – there’s a subtle difference.
Doncaster MP- Mad Ed
Doncaster council – Reform UK
What we need is a Doncaster by-election…
The Conservative and Labor elites, using the foghorn of the government-subsidized/controlled Corporate Media, brainwashed the people to vote for them, and now the people are paying though the nose, very high c/kWh, for all sorts of wind and solar systems polluting the grid with variable, intermittent electricity, which caused blackouts in Spain/Portugal, and in many other places.
Eliminating rotating generators that provide SYNCHRONOUS inertia is a death sentence for the grid.
Wind and solar provide NO SYNCHRONOUS inertia, because their outputs are digitized, then reconstituted into an artificial sine wave in phase with grid.
The irregular feed-ins to the grid often create transmission faults. Those faults can be minimized with synchronous condenser systems to provide reactive power to the grid.
Wind and solar take reactive power FROM the grid
Any energy systems analyst would know Iberia-like problems would eventually happen, before even a single wind and solar system were connected, but inane, naive, woke idiots do not want to listen to the pros.
Full speed ahead over the cliff, unless all this wind, solar, battery nonsense is stopped dead by taking away subsidies.
Net Zero to reduce CO2 by 2050 is a very expensive suicide pact.
We need higher CO2 ppm in the atmosphere for increased greening of the world, to support abundant fauna, and to increase crop yields to feed 8 billion people.
Sounds like every Brit needs to invest in personal back-up generation sufficient to last at least 2 weeks and probably 4. Like a petrol generator with a 100 gallon tank that’s kept full.
Some of us have !!!
PS: use diesel; petrol goes off quite quickly.
Bottled gas, candles and a good supply of batteries.
An acoustic guitar…
Only wood, the plastic ones don’t burn well.
You forgot to mention the full wine cellar… TICK!
Would the last person to leave the UK please turn off the lights?
Oh, wait… there’s no need to, Ed Minibrain has beaten us to it.
The security of the British electricity grid is not only being compromised by the increasing use of renewables. The other growing threat is the rising use of interconnectors between the UK and continental Europe particularly France the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Those links are what are required to ensure adequate supply during challenging demand periods particularly in winter when solar is zero and wind is often low.
If those interconnectors were sabotaged or destroyed by a malign intent our grid is isolated and unstable.
There is an urgent need for review of these interconnectors in these challenging times of world tension.
The problem is well known but our Ed seems to be unconcerned about conflict planning….well he is unconcerned about everything other than Net Zero apparently. So we have four more years of insane policy before sanity can be brought in.
We just hope we can last that long….is that a Russian dredger I see on the horizon?
Rod,
as I understand these D.C. links will not help with a black start so we are already an isolated grid from that point of view.
An AC link to another grid will cut off your supply in an instant to stop your instability spreading to them. That’s what happened to the 8 or so interconnectors between France and Spain. The blackout actually did spread to a few small area in France
That is an interesting point. It suggests the spinning generators stability elements on our grid i.e. fossil fuel, nuclear and hydro ate even more critical than might otherwise have been thought. Better tell Ed.
Correct they have no inertia. To restart from a complete blackout you basically physically go and pull all the pole and substation breakers. Then you start up a small area then you start reconnecting substations and pole fuses one by one. As the grid inertia comes up you can start doing multiple or bigger areas but the last thing you want is to bring on too much too fast and stall the grid again. If you do that you have to start the whole process again.
“If you do that you have to start the whole process again.”
Leon, take a cue from Nick Stokes and from Tim the Tool Man and think positive. At the very least, the grid operators will get a lot of practice doing it while the long-term transition into a synthetic inertia future is being implemented down there in Ozonia.
A question for Nick and Tim: Where does Ozonia currently stand in working towards a national synthetic inertia implementation plan, one written in response to a thorough engineering study and with costs, schedules, and critical milestones fully identified?
Ed
ED…Electrification Dysfunction
A drone attack on Ed’s offshore wind farms would be a relatively cheap way of crippling the country.
UKP1B per year. That’ll buy 1 GWh of batteries. The UK grid runs about 70GW on average, so that is one minute of backup. I hope there’s a plan B, plan A isn’t looking too sensible.
The UK grid runs about 70GW on average
This is just wrong.
Last year’s max was 47GW (source Gridwatch). This year to date is about the same.
Last year average was 28GW.
http://www.gridwatch.co.uk
Most estimates are that demand will rise if the program of electrification is implemented – mainly EVs and heat pumps. This would probably raise peak demand to somewhere north of 60GW in 2030, and when electrification is finally complete, by 2050, would about double it. You’d have to allow more to deal with normal increase in demand from regular economic growth.
This is peak demand, notice, not average.
So at average it will buy you 1/28 * 60 = 2.14 minutes 🙂
That really makes all the difference !!!!!
If you look at the spain incident they lost 40-60% of input so you get a whole 4 minutes to fix it, if you want to consider a similar event in Britain.
That really makes all the difference !!!!!
It makes no difference to the usefulness of the battery installation he is talking about. But get the numbers right, they are readily available, and there’s no excuse for totally misrepresenting the UK energy use situation.
If you are estimating how much generating capacity you need, and of what type, claiming that average demand is three times what it really is, that will make an important difference.
And why do it, anyway? The real numbers are one click away on gridwatch.
“But get the numbers right, they are readily available,”
Absolutely, we can’t make informed decisions from flawed data !!
Look what happened with ‘global warming’ … they applied ( deliberately flawed ) data to a flawed theory & managed to turn normal weather patterns into a pretend ‘climate crisis/emergency’, an existential threat with boiling acid seas, loss of Arctic ice by 2015, mass starvation, New York underwater (shame that didn’t happen ), Armageddon.
But it also created a real existential threat in the energy dept.
Please note blackouts don’t happen due to averages. They happen when the available supply is below the demand, instantaneously!
And batteries. Do you not use them on a daily basis and have them available to meet the load for a one day, two days, etc. blackout? That’s 672 GW Hrs “on average” per day, plus the demand increases you have noted.
Batteries do not instantaneously supply current. They are electrochemical devices that exhibit a well known phenomenon called voltage turn on delay. Every battery, every chemistry has this.
The older the battery/cell, the worse it gets. If the battery has accumulated passivation due to temperature, use, and age, the turn on delay can be minutes to tens of minutes.
The the problem for grid operators is this: how fast do the batteries have to be to prevent the grid crash such as Spain saw? The second question is: What batteries are optimum for meeting that timing? Capacity is critical, but it is secondary to voltage turn on delays. The third question is: how frequently must the batteries be replaced to keep them in spec to the turn on delay requirements?
The numbers have to correct for sure. When considering electricity demand the average is not so useful. The maximum has to be met or else.
At the risk of sounding like a stuck record (remember them?)
policy will not change until we have multiple power outages. We can probably count Spain as #1.
The insanity will continue until sufficient damage is accrued.
There’s no need to be that alarmist (leave that to the Themogeddonists – it destroys credibility) – even a black start will take a day or two to resolve not three months.
But the resulting wake up call will result in what South Africa’s ESKOM (electricity supply commission) calls “Load Shedding”.
Energy consumers will be managed to meet the supply availability by being frequently turned off.
So rolling blackouts will become increasingly commonplace.
“Load Shedding” is political doublespeak for “Power Failure”.
Welcome UK to the third world.
Good luck to a day or so. Substations have batteries to backup the supply to critical functions such as SCADA and fault protection. Once those batteries go flat the only way to re-energise the substation is by installing a portable generator to charge the batteries. This takes several hours per substation as the generator has to be connected into the substation earth system, tested, energised and the circuit breakers closed in a sensible manner. Typical battery period is around 24 hours, so as soon as the outage is longer than that recovery time grows very quickly.
Also communication networks that the substations depend on can in some cases also have battery backup and the ordering of the restoration can be a challenging task.
In South Australia, a small network compared to the UK, full restoration after its blackout took over a week due to this problem.
Spain’s collapse was almost certainly due to the speed of the change in frequency (ROCOF is the technical term) due to the lack on inertia in the system. This happens fast, much faster than the typical load shedding relay can operate reliably. In a traditional system with lots of rotating machinery ROCOF is normally < 2, i.e. it takes a half second for frequency to fall to 49 Hz or rise to 51 Hz. In systems with little rotating machinery ROCOF can approach 3 or 4 leaving almost no time for protection to operate once communication delays are included.
Note that DC links, windfarms and solar installations do NOT provide inertia.
And to Kalifornia.
The thing they need to ask themselves is: Are they feeling lucky? Maybe the Energy Gods will smile upon them, and the worst won’t happen. The lights will only go out for a few hours, perhaps a day. Whew, that was close! It’s rather exciting when you think about it. Like a roller coaster ride, with maybe a loose rail here or there. Gets the adrenaline flowing. Congratulations, you survived the blackout. This time.
It can also be revealed that Government officials have admitted it would take Britain “several months” to fully recover from a nationwide electricity outage.
The Government’s National Risk Register found that it would take “a few days” to get a “skeletal network” of power back up and running.
It added: “Full restoration could take up to seven days, however, depending on the cause of failure and damage, restoration of critical services may take several months.”
I have not been able to find the sources the several months claim is based on. Or any source for the ‘Government officials’ admission.
That it would be a disaster there is no doubt. And that it would be made more problematic by the lack of any synchronous support from the interconnect links is also not in doubt. But the claims of months need some kind of backup and proper analysis to be credible. And qualification, what exactly would the restoration look like, in what stages. What exactly would take months to restore?
It does seem likely that as Ed Miliband continues his rush to the cliff we will see a national blackout. The wind turbines are not coming on stream, solar will be resisted by Reform local governments, the old gas plant is reaching end of life and not being replaced, the nuclear is also going to be closing, there is heavy consumer resistance to both EVs and heat pumps. Even if he got the turbines, they are far short of what it would take to deliver enough power. There are no plans for adequate backup or storage. And prices are going to rise in order to get any wind installed, This is all becoming increasingly obvious, and its an easy campaign issue for Reform.
The interesting question is what Starmer will do. At the moment he is confronted with two unacceptable alternatives and reaching for fudges which will only deliver the worst of both. He can fire Miliband, repeal the Climate Change Act, abandon Net Zero, and go down in flames. Or he can soldier on, preside over national blackouts, and go down in flames.
The smart money is on the second. It delays the pain and maybe something will turn up.
We must stop the madness of net Zero. It achieves nothing to help us or the planet. It is a total sham. Just ask any proponent to explain what good it does and how. NONE CAN.
Back to the middle-ages you peasants !!
Now start muck raking !!
A £1 billion a year? This is several orders of magnitude too low. We (the UK) need to increase our grid capacity from 45GW to at least 100 with a plan to have only 5 of that nuclear and about the same from the highly-poluting DRAX. Everything else from unreliables and imports and a few old gas plants, if we allow them to survive. A windless week in the winter would require batteries of, say, 50GW for 168 hours = 8TWhr = 2 million Tesla mega packs at over £1 million each, £2 trillion. Have I got these numbers right?
Yes, but you are still optimistic!
Best estimates are for something between 25 – 70 TWh battery storage for a fully renewable grid, nuclear/biomass will alleviate that a bit, but if we take the lower figure that’s more like £25 trillion.
Most batteries available in the UK can operate for around 1.5 to 2 hours
Well, unless there is a drastic shift in policy, the UK, France, and Spain are going to provide us with an interesting future. Much is being discussed about a blackout, time to recovery, and potential impact. But that ends the scenario far too soon.
If there is a large-scale blackout due to the unreliability of renewables, you can bet those in charge will pull out all the stops to get power restored, and they will succeed. That success, though, will be heavily dependent on renewables; it’s all they’ve got. You’ve got to play the cards you’re dealt. So there will be another failure, possibly sooner depending on how much the equipment was stressed by the initial failure, and abused to get everything running again. This will be repeated until nothing works or they build traditional power plants.
The future is not what it use to be.
The pity is that it can be proven that CO2 has NO climatic effect!
ALL of our modern warming (since 1980) has been due to decreased levels of industrial SO2 aerosol pollution due to American and European “Clean Air” legislation and Net-Zero activities.
Decreased levels of atmospheric SO2 aerosol pollution increases the intensity of the solar radiation striking the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface, causing warming.
This INEVITABLE warming is ignored by everyone, and instead it is wrongly attributed to rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
This irrefutable!
Also see:” Scientific proof that CO2 does NOT cause global warming”.
https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-2024-0884.pdf
STORY TIP
Spain and Portugal got their power back up in about a day. Why would it take Britain a month? Even a day without power is pretty bad, but is there something unique about either Spain or Britain that causes radically different recovery times?
“is there something unique about either Spain or Britain that causes radically different recovery times?”
YES
Spain and Portugal have AC connections to France/Europe, so someone else’s inertia is available to do a quick restart.
Britain only has DC connections, so will take days/a week, to gradually build up inertia into the system, assuming no equipment damaged in the grid failure,
If equipment was damaged, then it could be months for replacements in those areas,
Maybe this is exactly what’s needed. A month with no electricity in winter will certainly be a wake-up call that even the self-absorbed Oxbridge soup-throwers can’t ignore. And once they’re done burying their frozen nans they might take a moment to change their slogan to Just Drill Oil. Then we can maybe get somewhere…
Oh wait, who am I kidding? They’ll just demand more solar panels. Because, just like my ex, they only ever surprise you unpleasantly.
Maybe months of darkness due to a severe blackout might force people to wisen up. I can’t observe much change in Spain, the same idiots that never have any cash on them still pay with plastic, talk goes more towards how to upgrade the existing PV system with batteries instead of dumping all that “renewable” crap and of course: “the government must do something about it”.
Well it seems that “the government” is considering to reconsider getting rid of the existing nuclear powerplants.
Doesn’t sound really convincing to me…
That’s the goal isn’t it?
Batteries don’t supply inertia. They are just as useless as wind and solar in that regard.
Another inverter based resource
Very clever of the Brits, playing the long game. Make their country so inhospitable that the migrants want to leave and go home.
Mister Ed has nothing whatsoever to do with this-
Ed Miliband’s wife joins ‘nimby’ campaigners against new housing development