Charles Rotter
The engineers who keep Britain’s grid in balance told investigators they are worried about whether they can keep doing it. The Times, in a piece by Emily Gosden, Ben Ellery and Juliet Samuel, reports on the review law firm Eversheds Sutherland carried out at the National Energy System Operator (Neso), which Neso published today.
The review began with a narrower question. In July, whistleblowers went to Claire Coutinho, then shadow energy secretary, alleging that control room staff were told to keep decisions in live documents with no audit trail and that the corporate affairs team leaned on operational calls to protect Neso’s reputation during the June heatwave. Neso brought in Eversheds on July 13.
Eversheds could not substantiate those specific allegations, and Neso’s announcement leads with that. What it did find:
These included a “culture of reputational sensitivity affecting operational decision-making”.
The day in question is June 23. A heat dome cut renewable output, gas units tripped and air conditioning load climbed. Grid frequency sat below Neso’s 49.8 Hz operating floor for most of the hour from 17:30 to 18:30, bottoming at 49.66 Hz, above the 49.5 Hz statutory limit. Neso followed with Electricity Margin Notices for the evening peaks of June 24 and June 26. In July, Neso said the system had operated securely throughout.
The control room saw it differently:
Control room staff said Neso should not have claimed the system was “not at risk” on June 23, given that “the system was consistently in breach of operational limits for a number of hours, with operators working around the clock to regain balance”.
On the warnings that were issued, and the ones that weren’t:
One witness described an “implicit understanding and expectation from the leadership to hear what they want to hear”, saying they felt pressure to convey a positive message and reassure bosses that “everything’s fine”. One witness said that those raising concerns “get beaten down”.
So the people at the console thought the public account of June 23 was wrong, and at least one of them thought warnings were weighed against how they would look in the press.
The report did not stop at one bad evening:
It found “high levels of stress and concern within the [control room] regarding the current state of the energy industry and the longer-term ability to maintain system balance, given the challenges of the net zero transition and increased reliance on renewables, which are less flexible than conventional generation, as well as current energy market structures”.
The Times adds a detail that explains part of that worry. Many smaller generators and batteries do not deal with Neso directly, so the engineers estimate what they are producing and cannot instruct them. Eversheds interviewed 28 senior control room staff and eight from elsewhere in the organisation. Neso has about 2,700 employees, some 130 of them in the control room.
Neso chairman Paul Golby said the findings showed no evidence for the allegations and that the board will oversee a response. Ofgem chief executive Tim Jarvis said the report raises “important and concerning issues about working culture” at Neso. Ofgem says it has not drawn conclusions about the events of June.
Eversheds was never asked whether the grid met its security standards on June 23. Coutinho made that point in the Commons in July. That question sits with Ofgem’s separate inquiry, which the Times reports is now extended into next year.
In an article in the Telegraph this morning on a similar subject – “Britain’s energy security worse than Ukraine’s” – Tara Singh, the chief executive of RenewableUK, said: “Home-grown clean power is enabling the UK to take back control of our energy, reducing the impact on hard-pressed bill payers of sudden price spikes in international gas markets caused by events we can’t control.”
And Chris Hewett, the head of industry body Solar Energy UK, said:
“For real energy security we must wean ourselves off reliance on expensive and volatile oil and natural gas.”
Of course these idiots would gob off such nonsense – their existence is entirely dependent upon subsidies paid by the taxpayer and utility customer.
And a spokesman for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “The UK has one of the most reliable electricity systems in the world. By delivering more home-grown power we control, with nuclear, solar and wind power, we are building resilience for the country and financial security for communities, families and businesses.”
All of these clowns really do believe and hope we’re all completely and utterly stupid, particularly in their willful attempt to tell us that wind and solar generation provides anything like cheap home-grown clean energy security and energy independence.
Notwithstanding use of the word “cheap” is nothing but a balled-faced lie – even for those without a brain in their head – there is not one of the minerals and metals required to construct renewable equipment and infrastructure that is produced in the UK. Not one.
And in that China controls the global refined production of all of these minerals and metals, the UK’s energy security – putting aside the fact that wind and solar generation is unreliable, intermittent, asynchronous, without inertia, fantastically expensive, and ridiculously inefficient – becomes entirely dependent upon . . . China.
I must admit, I am totally sick of this nonsense, and, in a peculiar way . . . I look forward to a major blackout.
(Seven hours and the above is the first comment. Has the power gone off?)
Some people seem to imagine God sends us a monthly bill for coal and oil and gas. But fossil fuels are exactly as free as wind and sun.
It’s the royalties and the extraction and profit on extraction that cost money.
The government hasn’t imposed royalties or excise on renewables yet, but the extraction isn’t cheap even if one excludes the cost of keeping fossil fuel backups idling for contingencies, and there is still a profit margin.
I too am becoming an accelerationist, but I want the blackout to be somewhere else, possibly Germany. (I have no beef with Germany. I choose it only because it seems the plausible location. Anywhere will do, though for some reason we’ve glossed over the example from the Iberian peninsula a few months ago, so maybe not there.)
Your point about depending on China for the technology is good. China is not the robust dragon we think. It’s hanging by a thread and aging out fast. What happens when China fails? It’ll make an OPEC supply restriction look like a penny ante poker bluff.
“The government hasn’t imposed royalties or excise on renewables yet..” Oh yes they have. They don’t call them royalties or excise, they call them subsidies. Without the subsidies, wind and solar are not profitable at all as Warren Buffett explained. You pay for the subsidies day by day through your taxes just as you pay for fossil products day by day through each and every one of all your other bills. You also pay through your electricity bill for all of the ancillary and backup expenses wind and solar impose on the grid which absolutely nobody in the wind/solar/advocacy business mentions nor even acknowledges. That is why electricity is becoming so expensive most everywhere.
Good point. I took my eye off the pea.
The price of stability apparently never makes it into the debate. That may be intentional. And who is smart enough to connect the dots of perpetual government subsidies and industry competitiveness anyway?
I assume equipment protection relays will trip at the 49.5 statutory limit (although there may be some settings above that to trip before it gets that bad). So they were probably just one power plant or transmission line trip from blackout. Hmmm…..
There was a UK blackout in 2019 affecting 1m premises, partially caused by all the solar farms using the same settings so they all disconnected at exactly the same time. There was a major reconfiguration that added a random time for disconnection, so in effect the disconnections are phased.
https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/?p=295
Thanks, kommando. But do the settings have a floor at the legal limit? If not, how do they justify not complying with the law?
Its the reaction timing that varies, the limit is the same but by staggering the reaction the shock to the system is reduced. It was already in the next standard but legacy systems had remained on the fixed reaction times, after the blackout they were upgraded over a 2 year period. Accelerated Loss of Mains Change Programme Form (ALoMCP)was the name given to the update.
“It found “high levels of stress and concern within the [control room] regarding the current state of the energy industry and the longer-term ability to maintain system balance, given the challenges of the net zero transition and increased reliance on renewables, which are less flexible than conventional generation, as well as current energy market structures.”
There is no net zero transition. This is an entirely imaginary idea which can never happen. Any serious attempt to achieve it will bankrupt Britain utterly.
Belief in net zero remains strong in corporate land. Yesterday I received the latest missive from Corporate HQ explaining (yet again) how we can all contribute to HQ’s target of net zero by 2040. It reminded us that the corporate finance stream that HQ dips into has sustainability clauses so that the finance is more expensive if certain targets aren’t met. This way of thinking is deeply entrenched. Perhaps, as suggested on another thread, it’ll take something like massive blackouts for some people to start questioning their beliefs.
Dilbert’s golden rule of work:
You do what the boss wants done and say what the boss wants said or work somewhere else.
I would take the word of the engineers any day over the officials.
Take no one’s word for it.
Royal Society
Now that England has imported a jihadist army that is looking for the right moment to rise up and commence the slaughter and overthrow that their religion demands, any widespread UK grid failure will likely be exploited to the max, and local failures will provide a taste of what is to come.
For those who don’t know, Islamic doctrine insists that there MUST be widespread slaughter. It’s in the Koran. Verse 8:67:
“It is not for a prophet to have captives [of war] until he inflicts a massacre [upon Allah ‘s enemies] in the land. Some Muslims desire the commodities of this world, but Allah desires [for you] the Hereafter. And Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise.”
In other words, it is god who wants the slaughter. Many religions started in search of explanation for flood, famine, disease, and other natural disasters, in hopes of finding relief from these natural “slaughters.” What did we do wrong? Why is the god, or some god, punishing us?
Islam is somewhat unique in that, after divining its view of god’s judgement, it does not wait for god to do the punishing, but itself provides the slaughter that it claims god wants.
Making it a religion of mass human sacrifice, somewhat akin to the Aztecs, but with war as its instrument of death, and blackouts are obviously a great opportunity for slaughter.