Britain is heading towards blackouts because of its overreliance on renewables, says energy expert Richard Lyon, who explains how Britain’s power grid works and why Net Zero is making it vulnerable to severe outages.
By Richard Lyon
This week the Scotsman published a piece of mine asking whether Britain’s power grid would pass the safety test every North Sea oil platform must pass before it can operate. This is the background to that article: how a grid works, how it fails and why an engineer from a safety-critical industry is uneasy about ours.
A machine the size of a country
A grid must make exactly as much electricity as it uses, every instant, because wires store almost nothing. Engineers watch two dials to see whether it is healthy.
The first is frequency: the beat of the alternating current, 50 times a second in Britain. It is the same everywhere on the connected grid. That shared beat is what defines a grid: not everything wired together, but everything running in step. Produce less than customers use and the whole grid slows; produce more and it speeds up.
The second is voltage, which works like pressure in a water pipe. It differs from place to place, and only equipment nearby can correct it.
Both dials must stay inside tight limits to protect the machinery. Power-station turbines are built to spin at one speed, and running at a different speed wears them out. Too much voltage breaks down the insulation in cables and equipment, and too little makes motors overheat. Outside the limits, machines disconnect to save themselves, usually just when the grid needs them most.
Three jobs that came free
For a century, the big spinning generators in coal, gas, nuclear and hydro stations have held both dials. Besides making energy, each does three other jobs, bundled into the price.
Its heavy spinning mass works as a flywheel: when another station trips, it resists the slowdown and buys seconds for backup to arrive. Engineers call this inertia.
When lightning or a fallen tree causes a short circuit, a spinning generator pours out a surge of current several times its normal rating, straight from physics. That surge is the alarm that tells the grid’s automatic switches which damaged line to cut out.
And its controls push local voltage up or down to keep it in its band.
Wind, solar, batteries and the cables to Europe connect instead through power electronics called inverters. Most in service today add no inertia. Their electronics cap their fault current close to normal output, because more would burn them out. And they help hold voltage only if designed and instructed to. Swap a gas station for a solar farm of the same rating and the alarm falls to a fraction, and the switches may struggle to tell which line to cut out before the fault spreads.
How grids fail
Grids are run to a rule engineers call N-1, said ‘N minus one’: the grid must be able to lose any single power station or line without anyone losing power. Britain appears to have broken it on June 23rd, in a heatwave. And even when the rule holds, trouble comes when several things fail together.
Each machine that disconnects hands its load to whatever is left. If the survivors are near their limits, they trip too. The inquiry into North America’s 2003 blackout put it bluntly: a cascade “cannot be stopped by human intervention once started”.
The last defence is to cut off blocks of customers automatically, sacrificing some to save the rest. On August 9th 2019 in Britain, lightning struck a line, and an offshore wind farm and a gas station dropped out. About a million customers lost power, and all were back within 45 minutes. The grid held. That was a controlled cut, not a blackout.
Spain on April 28th 2025 was a blackout. It was a quiet, sunny day with low demand, and lightly loaded lines push voltage up. Too few conventional plants were running to pull it down, and some of those failed to. As voltage rose, generators tripped one after another, each trip pushing it higher. Cutting customers made it worse, because less load meant higher voltage still. About 27 seconds after the first big trip, Spain and Portugal were dark.
Why Net Zero makes this harder
Net Zero closes the machines that did all three jobs and replaces them with machines that do few or none. Every function that came with a coal, gas or nuclear station must now be bought back, or done without.
Britain is doing both. NESO, which runs the grid, now pays for stability as a standalone function: mostly spinning machines that burn no fuel and sell no energy, there to provide weight and fault current. Two of its stability tenders cost £328 million and £323 million. That cost reaches your bill as a balancing charge, and part of the “Balancing costs” line on our Subsidy Clock. Meanwhile, the minimum spinning weight it keeps on the system has been cut by 15%, approved by the regulator, Ofgem, in May. The review behind that cut is charged with weighing the cost of a safety margin against the risk of losing it. This year, the margin lost.
The danger has also moved. A cold, still week in winter is a shortage you can see coming, and the answer is planned rota cuts: unpleasant, but controlled. The blackout risk now gathers on light, sunny days, when demand is low and few spinning plants are running. Those were Spain’s conditions. British demand fell to 12.8 gigawatts last year, against a winter peak of about 46.
A mild day sounds a safe one to lose power. It is not, because a blackout stops everything that runs on electricity at once: phones and the internet, home-based medical equipment, water pumping and sewage, petrol pumps, card payments and cash machines, and with them the shops. The Government’s worst-case plan has everyone reconnected only after five or six days. But that’s a guess: Britain has never had a total blackout, so it has never had to restart the whole grid for real.
And that last defence – rota cuts – is weakening. It works by cutting off whole neighbourhoods to reduce demand. But at midday on a sunny day, many of those homes are also making power from rooftop solar panels, so each cut removes supply as well as demand and does less good. With less spinning weight on the grid, frequency also falls faster, leaving less time for the cuts to work. NESO’s own research says the scheme was not designed for either problem, and that this “reduces the effectiveness”.
The other side
Defenders of the detransition say all this is solvable. Fuel-less spinning machines and newer inverters that imitate a flywheel can do much of the work, and NESO is already buying them.
But solvable is not solved, and it is not free. None of these costs appears in the wholesale price quoted to show that renewables are cheap. They are bought piecemeal, after the plant that once provided the functions rolled in has closed, while margins are trimmed to keep the bill down.
Nor has it been done before. No large grid anywhere has yet run mostly on wind, solar and batteries with so little spinning plant behind it. NESO’s Chief Executive calls its stability programme “world-first“, and means it as praise. Britain is running a colossal experiment on a system that cannot be allowed to fail.
None of this means the lights are about to go out. It means the grid’s safety is shifting from physics, which came free, to contracts, settings, judgement and experiments which do not. Spain went from trouble to darkness in 27 seconds. The judgement that mattered had been made months before.
Richard Lyon is a former senior oil and gas operations manager with 35 years of international experience, and academic qualifications in electrical engineering and power systems, petroleum engineering and energy economics. His book The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can’t Work — And What Can is published by Swift Press. Subscribe to his Substack page, the State of Britain, where this article first appeared.
Well let the UK blackout happen I’d say, maybe it will put an end of all this ecotarded nonsense of meddling with an electric grid that used to work well.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix nor touch it…the old maintenance saying applies over and over again.
The blackouts will be eventually blamed on climate change.
In spain they got caught by surprise and had to come up with atmospheric anomaly BS.
By now they should have fabricated a unified narrative for the coming blackouts – atmospheric anomalis caused by climate change maybe.
Spain blames the fossil operators for not operating at a loss and providing spinning reserve.
Yeah, the sun went behind a cloud.
Well let the UK blackout happen I’d say,
Then you would be lacking imagination.
85% of households in the UK are heated by gas, which requires electricity to run the pumps and ignition. Oil fired boilers in the country also require power for the pumps. Gas hobs are rare now, people cook on electricity. They use mobiles or after digitization finishes in Feb of this year will be using VOIP for voice calls, both will stop working. Freezers will defrost, both domestic and commercial. Payment systems? Refuelling EVs stops, and gas/diesel vehicles need power for the pumps. Hospitals and medical offices? Trains? Ambulances? Supermarkets? If you can even get to them.
This is only a tiny sample list. If you think through what this would mean during a few weeks of zero C temperatures, it will mean mass deaths, and when the country gradually recovers, a political revolution. This will not be like previous hard winters, not at all.
[“If you think through what this would mean during a few weeks of zero C temperatures, it will mean mass deaths, and when the country gradually recovers, a political revolution.“]
Sadly, it will take that to wake people up to the scam … & the scammers.
Several inaccuracies in your piece. A lot of us still have gas hobs and may still be at least at 50% where the only inconvenience is having to light the gas manually. Had you read the article you would see that we face our biggest risk during the summer when power demand is low such as what happened in 2019.
I recall: If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it. Here are two of my favorite quips: They only learn the hard way, and: When will they ever learn?
Even if a blackout does occur, the renewables lobby will try to claim that it had nothing to do with renewables. The renewables lobby even tried to claim that the Spanish blackout wasn’t caused by renewables. As an example of this, here is a link claiming that the Spanish blackout had nothing to do with renewables.
https://thegoodlobby.eu/lights-out-facts-in-spains-blackout-wasnt-about-renewables/
I read the stupid little article. It totally ignores what a cascade failure is and how wind and solar is just as liable as 100% fossil fuels. Cascade failures with spinning generation provide time, not much, but time to react. Inverters, no such time is available. Cascade failures will occur at blinding electronic speed.
Preventive actions are automatic and usually timed in number of cycles. In Europe, it’s usually 50 cycles per second and 60 cycles per second in the U.S. So, if a breaker must trip open or closed in 10 cycles, is has 1 fifth or sixth of a second to do its job. Not very forgiving.
Several of our trolls tried to claim that the Texas blackout from several years ago was the fault of fossil fuel plants because there weren’t enough of them to take over when wind and solar quit.
The real problem is what will happen when those fossil fuel generators disappear as they are closed down. That was just a preview of some failing because gas wasn’t available, what will occur when they are no longer there at all.
The Retarded Energy supporters will claim that their prized systems are cheap, or even free; yet we have never seen a grid where large amounts of wind or solar have actually lowered electricity rates! They like to ignore the costs of backups, synchronization, and stabilization; as if those don’t count when you receive your utility bill.
Having worked on several off-grid systems of PV with generator backup, I like to think of Retarded Energy as a niche solution; useful for those that want to get away from it all, or explore space. Maybe that is why so many of its supporters have trouble understanding the problems associated with solar and wind; their minds are already lost in space!
The claim is that those other costs are not the responsibility of wind and solar, so shouldn’t be charged to wind and solar.
The fact that none of those other things would have been needed had we stayed with fossil fuels goes completely over their heads.
Reasonable summary for the non-technical.
Britain’s biggest risk is a sunny and windy summer day. And a cascade failure
Mostly winter over demand can be handled by deliberate load shedding or backup plant.
Even overseas backup. Norwegian hydro can be tapped, at a cost.
This is a very simple story. UK demand last year was winter high of 46GW and a summer low of 13GW.
The bottom line is the UK is following an energy policy which is bound to result at some point in peak production coinciding with low demand, and low production coinciding with peak demand.
Production from about 30GW of wind a was high of 18.4GW and low of 0.084GW. Last year and the year before CGCT delivered a peak of 26-27GW from end of life gas stations.
The problem is if at some point in the next few years it all comes together, demand rises above 50GW maybe to 60GW at a winter peak, because EVs and heat pumps, and wind falls below 5GW during the same period, and there is no way to make up the gap because the old gas stations have gone off grid, nukes are constant but also end of life. And its winter, so there is no solar.
Sooner or later this is bound to happen. When it does there will be regional shutdowns and probably a nationwide blackout.
This is what you get when you try to put politicians in charge of your national energy policy who have spent three formative years studying literary criticism, or what passes for literature nowadays, and have no idea how to think connectedley about operational issues.
What about the restart? No-one has ever tried restarting a national grid from wind and solar in the middle of a winter calm, so we just don’t know from experience how long it will take or how to go about it. Could it take a month? Who knows? Could it even turn out to be impossible?
There is also a problem with low summer demand coinciding with peak supply, as the author explains. But the real disaster in human welfare will most likely come from the winter problem.
Remember that the UK can have sudden ferocious late winter – early spring cold spells and snowstorms, Look them up:
1946/7
1962/3
1982
2010/11
2018
If one of these were to coincide with blackouts what would the human consequences be?
All-Time Peak Hourly Demand: ERCOT set a massive new record of 91,090 MW (91.1 GW) on July 22, 2026, at 6:00 p.m. CT. ERCOT supplies about 90% of the Texas Grid.
A student of mine worked night shift in the neonatal ICU. She came in one morning looking like something the cat dragged in. The power had gone off and the generator failed to start. They had 5 babies on respirators and 6 staff. 5 of them pumped those and one nurse looked after the whole rest of the ward for 2 hours. The generator had started normally on testing 2 days before — shite happens.
Another “expert” with out of date knowledge.
Grid batteries provide synthetic inertia.
He goes on to say
And the UK has been adding the “newer inverters” which he just glosses over and has added over 7GW worth. Right now the UK grid is showing as 28GW demand and a quarter of that represents a lot of synthetic inertia. And its growing.
Note, 7GW is intentionally an output measure, not a capacity measure because its how much energy the batteries can immediately supply at 50Hz to perform their frequency response function to stabilise the grid.
Linking to a sales brochure is unhelpful. You assert some metrics but leave it to us to find your supporting evidence. It may be out there. You may be right. But none of us can be bothered to help you make your argument. Show your work please.
Synthetic inertia has to be designed-in. By default it doesn’t exist. So the burden of proof is definitely on people claiming (or trying to imply) there is enough it.
From the 2023 AEMO document on Inertia
Synthetic inertial response
A synthetic inertial response is the emulated inertial response from an inverter-based resource that is inherently initiated in response to a power system disturbance, and sufficiently fast and large enough to help manage RoCoF.
I see you edited your post after my response.
The point is that modern grid scale batteries will definitely have the functionality. They’ve had it for years now and nobody in their right mind will be buying a grid scale battery without it. Whether its enabled or not is another matter, but the solution is there to be used.
I did edit it, but within 30 seconds of posting it. You must have been quick enough to see it unedited before composing your response. These things happen. I hope no one gets the impression I edited it because of your response.
Perhaps there was some lag between the original post appearing and the edited post replacing it, as presented to me.
I wasn’t thinking you were being intentionally misleading though, and my comment really was to confirm I was answering the post more fully.
The big problem is that a spinning generator will keep turning slower and slower until it kicks off thus providing some time to react. A battery powered inverter will shut off with blinding electronic speed thereby not allowing any time.
Frequency control is only part of the problem. The current that can be provided is also an issue. They go together. It is also part of the problem in a restart. Has the grid been designed to allow a single station to restart by isolating the proper legs? Who knows? That is what Michael above addressed. Can you promise that the grid design will allow a “newer inverter” to even start after a real black-out? Does the first substation it is connected to have sufficient granularity in its legs to allow the connected battery to start? If not, then you must go deeper into the grid and isolate further. Geez, you may have to actually disconnect major users at their point of service. Has any of this been tested and proven. If not, you are talking major time to figure it out.
How is their reaction time a problem, exactly? When a spinning generator goes out of spec with regards frequency, breakers disconnect it immediately and its inertia has nothing to do with the speed at which it happens.
How is their reaction time a problem,
I will simply say, inertia from spinning generators do allow some reaction time for the grid to protect itself. Electronic inverters allow no reaction time. If a battery inverter kicks off you can have an uncontrolled shutdown throughout the grid.
The other problem is restart. If you don’t consider that, I don’t want you planning my grid.
In both cases, when they go out of spec with respect to the grid, disconnection time is immediate.
Inertia is a store of energy. When demand spikes, the spinning generator immediately begins to slow as the energy of inertia is converted to electrical output and meanwhile the driver (eg steam) is increased to provide more driving force to speed up again and balance the new required energy output.
For batteries there is none of that. In principle, the battery powered inverter can produce whatever frequency it wants and current to the limit of its spec. If it goes out of spec, it disconnects.
Grid forming inverters define the grid frequency, not follow it like rooftop solar inverters do. Your restart “problem” is a strawman argument.
Remind me again why we are doing this?
How much grid battery back-up are you talking about? These battery back/up systems are quite expensive are they not? Those who favor this renewable technology seem to be on defense defending renewable energy as though this will be useful with more time and money to iron out the various wrinkles and nuances. I think not. The renewable energy is a niche utility and nothing more. Believing it can power modern society is simply dishonest.
Batteries have come down in price enormously and are being added to renewable heavy grids everywhere for exactly the reason of stability and servicing maximum demand, at least initially.
It’s already happening.
Inverters provide active power but no VARS so you don’t have any voltage support and a diminishing power factor. But, slay queen.
From Google AI because why write it myself.
A Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) supports reactive power (VAR / MVAR) through its bi-directional smart inverters or power conversion system (PCS). This allows the system to stabilize grid voltage without draining or degrading the physical battery cells.
How BESS VAR Support Works
• Four-Quadrant Operation: Utility-scale BESS units can independently control real power (MW) and reactive power (MVAR) in all four quadrants of the AC power cycle.
• Voltage Regulation: The BESS injects reactive power when grid voltage drops and absorbs reactive power when grid voltage is too high, using control modes like Volt-VAR or power factor droop.
• Zero Battery Impact: During pure reactive power (VAR) support where real power (P = 0) and reactive power (Q ≠ 0), the current flowing through the battery cells is near-zero. This means providing VAR support does not cycle or wear out the battery.
• Harmonic Filtering: Proper AC-side and DC-side inductive filters (such as 1 mH to 5 mH designs) suppress current ripples and keep total harmonic distortion (THD) below 5%.
• STATCOM-Like Capability: With advanced firmware, a BESS can operate similarly to a Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM) or Static Var Generator (SVG) to deliver fast, sub-cycle voltage support.
Slayed.
My god you’re an imbecile. What interconnect are you are certified operator in?
Ironic considering your comment was “Inverters provide active power but no VARS” and not specific to interconnectors.
My response was specific to BESS which I claimed provide the synthetic inertia and now claim can manage reactive power too with a quoted example.
Did you think about this. If the battery need not provide real voltage and current, why do grids do so much to deal with reactive power? There would be no reason for any generator to supply power so what is the result. Under a reactive load, additional current must be sent into the grid. That additional current is the killer. It can easily reach more that 100% of current ratings of the inverters.
Look at it this way. If you have a 1MW load at 10³ V, the generator must supply 10⁶/10³ = 1000 A. If there is a power factor of 0.7, the generator must supply the difference to meet the load. 1000 * 0.7 = 700 A. So an additional 300 A must come from somewhere. Can your inverters do that? Can they do that on a dead start? That is part of what makes a dead start so hard. Every motor on the grid is trying to start at the same time. Every refrigerator, air conditioner, air handler, factory, furnace fan, water pump, etc. You could easily need linemen to throw breakers on the first energized leg out of a sub-station just to reduce the current draw. Somebody mentioned if a renewable system could even be restarted. Can you give a definite yes to that question?
They’re designed to do it. Do you think the electrical engineers who build and design them for the grid forgot or something?
I can say that Spain restarted its renewable heavy grid in what I would consider to be unbelievably quickly. About a third in about an hour and the whole thing in under a day.
The electrical engineers design based on a requirements definition document prepared by someone else.
So you’re implying that the engineers who design, build and test BESS grid forming inverters dont know what they’re doing. Nice.
You’ve never done engineering have you.
Engineers are handed specs to design toward. You don’t under engineer nor do you over engineer. If the specs are wrong, so be it. Other folks do the planning, estimate loads, critique rights of way, all the other necessary work then give to the engineer to fit it together.
You dont even know what engineers do. Its engineers that design the solution, not pointy haired managers providing incorrect specs. The engineer specifies the operation parameters and designs the fail safes.
If an administrator is involved, its in buying the BESS and maybe they’ll buy an insufficient one or …almost certainly they wont because people in the energy industry are usually competent, especially when millions of dollars of investment is involved.
Batteries cannot instantly respond. They are electrochemical and have a characteristic called voltage turn-on delay. The older the battery or the colder the battery, the greater the magnitude of the voltage droop and response delay. Then there is the issue of the invertors. Batteries are DC.
Literally zero, of course not but put numbers to that. And compare to say steam, hydro or a gas turbine’s response. Battery response is MUCH faster than anything else available. Response is incredibly fast, the decision to respond takes time but only a very little time.
Google says
Grid battery response time is typically under 10 to 250 milliseconds for utility-scale systems (like Lithium-ion and flow batteries), and around a tenth of a second (100–110 ms) for fast frequency containment services
Another specific example
For example, the Hornsdale Power Reserve can deliver its full 150 MW capacity in less than 250 milliseconds, providing critical frequency control services to maintain grid stability.
Or from AEMO
FFR – the FFR provided by a GFM BESS acts based on the measurement of frequency change. Generally, the FFR is fast, with response time in a few hundreds of milliseconds (ms). Therefore, FFR can have a confounding impact on the quantification of synthetic inertia provided by a GFM BESS. This confounding impact would vary based on the operating point of a GFM BESS, the size of the contingency, and thus the RoCoF the GFM BESS is exposed to. Therefore, it is recommended that FFR (or any equivalent frequency support based on the frequency measurements) should be disabled when determining synthetic inertia of a GFM BESS.
I have come back and commented again, but its the same endless pile of utterly insulting ads from mgid.com, and the repeated conspiratorial popups, so I’ll go away again. Its inexplicable why the site is doing this to its readers and commenters.
Yes, you can block them fairly easily. But the problem is how it devalues the site. The site consists of the visitor experience as a whole. When you have page after page of this garbage, that changes the site experience, it garbages the site.
Tragic really. This has been one of the few voice of sanity on climate and energy issues, with lively and well informed commenters, and remarkable for its tolerance of contrary points of view. I understand there must be financial pressures, but surely something as damaging as this cannot be the answer.
People will say, subscribe. I have reasons for not wishing to do this, but again, a site which offers you the choice between subscription and pollution is not the same site as it was before all this started to fill it.
Very sorry this has happened.
Use Ghostery plus an Ad blocker = no ads & no trackers.
I am well aware how to block this stuff.. That is not my point. My point is what its done to the nature of the site, what has been done to what was a valuable site by polluting it with this offensive and insulting garbage. Its difficult to imagine what the reasoning can be – that its offensive garbage is undeniable. That it is there in quantity is also undeniable.
Whether you block it or not you are still visiting and participating in a site which is being deliberately polluted with this stuff by the editorial team. It is extraordinarily bad – this is the only site I know which is polluted with this level of stuff on this scale.
Sites are a whole, the whole of what content is on them. I understand that there are financial pressures, but surely they cannot be so acute and other remedies so lacking that this is the only solution? Because in the end this stuff destroys the credibility and attractiveness of the site. That is what I am pointing out, and that is what I am regretting. And what I am also refusing to go along with.
Old marketing adage: for every one who complains, 100 are unhappy. For every one that is unhappy 100 will not buy. You simply cannot run a site like this, with this proportion of such offensive material, and expect it to have weight with the policy influencing classes. The people you need to reach simply will not put up with it.
It is a great pity. It used to be a site where one could recommend material published on it to serious people, though ones who have no interest in subscribing. And this is what this pile of garbage which has become such a prominent feature of it has lost.
“Let’s take something which worked well, and was relatively cheap, which people depend on for their lives and livlihoods and replace it with a giant horribly expensive Rube Goldbergian contraption we have to keep tinkering with, adding more complexity to, and more chances of failure with. It’ll be fun! Come on man, don’t be such a fuddy-duddy worry wort!”
Everything we discuss is irrelevant. Without CO2 there can be no life on earth. Can’t people get this through their thick heads.
re: “The first is frequency: the beat of the alternating current, 50 times a second in Britain.”
.
Given the wording, I would say: “the beat of the alternating current, 100 times a second … ” on account of 50 Hz mains produces two sine ‘pulses’ (one positive, one negative) per cycle.
.
But, again, this would be me and my preferred wording if using the word “beat” rather than cycles.
Don’t mention three phase….
Sadly, nowhere in the above article is an 1857 Carrington event-like disruption of electrical grids (caused by an intenses geomagnetic storm due to a solar CME impacting Earth’s magnetosphere/ionosphere) mentioned.
Google’s AI bot states this:
“Worldwide telegraph systems failed, sparking lines, melting platinum contacts, and causing operator shocks. Some telegraph operators were able to send and receive messages with their batteries completely disconnected, powered solely by the auroral electric current.”
Back in 1857, the US electrical grid was nowhere near as widely distributed nor anywhere near as complex as it is today. In 1857, the US economy was nowhere near as dependent on interconnected electrical grids as it is today.
Modern estimates for damages from a Carrington-level event happening today range from hundreds of billions to trillions of US dollars, potentially knocking out power transformers for months OR YEARS.
Given the randomness inherent in nature, it is not a matter of “if” Earth experiences a CME-induced geomagnetic storm equivalent to or greater in magnitude than the Carrington event, it is only a matter of “when”.
“Renewable” power sources, being inherently dependent on electrical/electronic devices to convert DC current to grid-level AC current and carefully matched in voltage and frequency and phase will be particularly susceptible to suffering electrical component damage and going off-line for a very long time period.
YIKES!
I believe the Carrington Event occurred in 1859 A.D.
Yes, Stan Brown, you are of course correct. The Carrington event was specifically September 1–2, 1859. (Earth time, that is. 🙂 )
My apology for the error . . . fading memory, I guess.
“Too much voltage breaks down the insulation in cables and equipment, and too little makes motors overheat.”
And when too little voltage makes motors overheat the insulation within is broken down, just like too much voltage causes cables to overheat. Electric insulation, a very much underappreciated technology.
The UK is just another, though very visible, crash test dummy for renewables. Nothing but shoot-ready-aim from the renewables crowd. With today’s technology and engineering there shouldn’t be this many renewable grid failures. Roof top solar seems to be working somewhat satisfactorily but I doubt the long term savings being touted. All I here from my neighbors is “my monthly bill went to zero” after the first year or so. Wait for the warranties to end and equipment failures and aging to factor in. An inverter can cost two years of grid electricity.
Not sure why this is a concern. After all, neither the electorate nor political leaders show any. Concern, that is. The greenies should be bragging about this potential achievement. After all, a complete blackout would almost reach their ultimate goal of NetZero instantaneously. For at least a sizable fraction of them, any loss of life resulting from the blackout would be considered a positive consequence. Fewer folks, less CO2. Population reduction has been announced as one of their goals by many climate fanatics. Several examples can be found at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/population-control-movement-climate-malthusian-similarities/673450/ There are many others.
For those who have not yet recognized this possible benefit, that would be consistent with their pronounced tendency to treat unintended consequences as if they were truly a surprise.
Germany has solved the problem of blackouts.
The Russian sea drones can help them out after mapping all the cables on the sea floor.
No matter what you think of wind, solar and storage they are not suited for the grid. Remove them from the grid, fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Everybody knows that will work.
The late Christopher Booker pointed out as you have that our greatest risk is in summer and not perhaps the expected winter. I well remember the August 2019 power cut as the effects lasted well beyond 45mins given that the Siemens Thameslink trains refused to restart when the power returned and paralysed the lines with stuck trains.