My blog post on the threat to energy security on 8 January went viral. It’s the single most widely read thing I have ever written, and it has been widely re-shared on social media and quoted in the press. The National Energy System Operator (“NESO”) is very unhappy with me, and has disputed my claims, telling journalists:
“NESO operates Great Britain’s electricity network to one of the highest levels of safety and reliability anywhere in the world. Yesterday our control room engineers used our standard operational tools to manage the electricity network and ensure that we maintained enough electricity for our standard operating contingency. At no point were electricity supplies less than anticipated demand and our engineers were able to rebalance the system without the need to consider emergency measures. One of the standard operating reserves held by NESO at all times is for the largest power generator on the system, which last night was 1400 MW, not the 580MW that has been quoted online,”
– Craig Dyke, Director of System Operations, NESO
OK, then, so what units exactly were held in reserve and how quickly could they have come on? Generating assets do not sit around idle on days when there’s a lot of money to be made – if they could run on 8 January, they did run. Elsewhere in comments to journalists, NESO pointed to the fact that the Capacity Market was not activated, which could have yielded further supply, but again, my question is, which units could run in the Capacity Market but were not running anyway on the day? The other problem is that one reason there was not a Capacity Market activation was that NESO got its demand forecast wrong, something which is actually quite common.
The demand forecast is a critical component of the determination of the spare margin – if you don’t know what the demand will be, you cannot be confident that sufficient margin has been secured.
So in this post I will look at what NESO does to forecast demand and the system margin, why it is difficult, and why it is actually getting harder as the energy transition progresses. I will demonstrate that these forecast errors can be so large that it is simply not possible for NESO to claim with any confidence that it always has the required level of reserves in hand, and that on days when the market is tight, this creates additional risks to security of supply.
How is the system margin and day ahead energy requirement calculated?
The Grid Code sets out the basis for NESO’s forecasts (OC 1.6.1) – see box. It is interesting to see what is missing from this list which is a feature of the age of the Grid Code. Yes, the website is regularly updated but this section of the Code has clearly not been revised in a long time – for example, why are batteries only included for demand and not supply? And why do embedded assets not have to provide information to NESO? The answer is that they did not exist when the list was written.
Another question is why has NESO not proposed any Code amendments to bring the forecasting requirements up to date (I suspect the answer is that this would lead to an obligation to update its models and processes which takes time and money – a bit like turkeys voting for Christmas!)
There are five main components to this calculation of system margin and the day ahead energy requirement that create significant levels of uncertainty:
- Expected contribution from renewables: this is difficult to forecast since it depends on the notoriously hard to predict weather. The error attributable to this component is increasing as the amount of renewables on the system grows.
- Expected contribution from embedded generation: NESO has no direct visibility of the amount of embedded generation so this is simply an estimate. Again, as the amount of embedded generation, particularly renewables, grows, this becomes harder to predict.
- Amount of potential demand flexibility (consumer demand management): this does not relate to the Demand Flexibility Service, it is the growing trend of suppliers and aggregators helping consumers to optimise their energy costs by changing their usage profiles. For example, where large energy consumers have hourly pricing, they could save money if they reduced consumption during peak hours. While these data are required under the Grid Code to be submitted to NESO by Suppliers, they are not published anywhere. It is therefore unclear how significant this element is, but anecdotally, this is a growing trend, so there are questions about how changes in the behaviour of demand affects NESO’s modelling.
- Expected grid constraint limits and volumes of generation that may be constrained: because of the difficulties in modelling renewable and embedded generation, constraint modelling becomes much harder. In addition, reserve is procured nationally, and it is not always clear to what extent constraints may interfere with the delivery of the reserve. A further difficulty is that Network Management Systems (“NMS”) on the distribution networks are increasing in complexity, and their impact on the transmission system is increasing, but, as with embedded generation, NESO has limited visibility of them. The impact of this is that the control room might instruct say 50 MW of reserve to activate, but because a DNO activated its NMS nearby as a result of an overloaded line, 50 MW of nearby generation disappears negating the actions of the control room.
- The likely interconnector position including the possibility of short-notice counter trading: the difficulties with this were described in my previous post – interconnectors can be re-traded during the day, sometimes at short notice, and this is next to impossible for NESO to model ahead of time.
Forecasting errors are growing but there is little transparency over them
In my previous post, I described the very limited forecast error data published by NESO – demand forecast performance analysis contains half-hourly forecast versus out-turn data from April 2021 and November 2024. According to this, the forecast error can be from 0 MW to 4,686 MW with an average of 609 MW. This magnitude of error could be critical on a tight day like 8 January.
However, these data are (a) not published very often, and (b) not sufficiently granular. Half-hour intervals are very long in the context of system margin management – averaging over half an hour potentially disguises the size of the error over the shorter timescales that are relevant to margin and frequency management. And the most recent data are only up to the end of November. NESO should publish its forecast error in 1-minute intervals, and it should be available much faster, so that market participants can understand the reliability of system margin and demand data.
I recently wrote about frequency jumps, demonstrating that the frequency is moving outside the operational limits thousands of times a year. A 1 GW loss of supply would typically drop the frequency by 0.2 Hz. However, unlike generation losses, which are instant, forecasting errors can build up, so will not necessarily be visible as a jump on the frequency. The accumulation of these errors could be an explanation for the regularity with which the frequency operating limits are breached, but without transparency on the size and nature of the errors, it is difficult to be certain.
Forecasting errors will lead to greater frequency variability, and if frequency moves away from 50 Hz ie outside the operational limits without a corresponding loss of generation, it is highly likely that a forecasting error was to blame. This chart shows the number of 5-second intervals during which grid frequency was more than 0.05 Hz away from the 50 Hz target. These are increasing over time, other than a hiatus during covid when they trended sideways).
In addition to its existing day-ahead accuracy disclosures, NESO should publish its forecasting error at 4 and 8 hours ahead of delivery because the forecasts are not static – as a general rule, forecasts should become more accurate the closer to real time they are produced, but with so many variables over which NESO has limited visibility, this may not be the case. The market should not only know what the margin and load expectations are at different time intervals before delivery, but what forecast errors apply over these time intervals.
It is particularly critical at short lead times because of the relationship between demand, supply and grid frequency. The Security and Quality of Supply Standard (“SQSS”) requires NESO to secure the single largest infeed loss, but this is likely to be inadequate if there are material forecasting errors. It is essential that over 1-5 minute intervals there is enough reserve to cover the largest infeed loss, but this assumes that the full amount of demand is already covered – if the full amount of demand is not covered because of errors in forecasting either demand or generation, a larger reserve would be needed. To decide whether this is the case, these data need to be known and understood.
NESO should also publish error data on each component of its forecasts using the categories set out in OC 1.6.1 of the Grid Code. There’s a well-known truth that if something is not measured it is never fixed, and this is the case here. We know that NESO’s demand forecasts can be very wrong. We also know that on a tight day like 8 January these errors could prove to be the difference between the lights being on or off.
And since anecdotally (and logically) the causes of the forecasting errors are becoming more important to the system overall, over time these errors are likely to grow, so without measurement and transparency over the measurements, there will be no incentive to improve, which could prove disastrous as we move towards the Clean Power 2030 goals. And the Grid Code forecasting requirements should be updated to take account of the way the system is changing.
The SQSS should require NESO to secure the single largest infeed loss plus an amount which would cover forecasting errors. Of course, to be able to do this, the forecasting errors must be calculated, and for transparency reasons, published to the market. Not only do these errors lead to an elevated risk of blackouts in tight conditions, they could also be one of the drivers of the controversy around battery skip rates – the current under-use of batteries when there is excess generation on the network.
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NESO has been quick to refute my claims that the system margin was extremely tight on 8 January, but it has not provided the data to support its position (other than the fact there was neither demand control or a blackout). However, if its demand forecast can be out by 4.7 GW over a half-hourly interval (on a day-ahead basis), what sort of errors is it making within-day? And what is the error over 1-minute intervals which are relevant for frequency control? How confident can we really be that NESO actually does hold sufficient reserves at all times if there is so much uncertainty over the actual system margin?
So I am calling for an audit of NESO’s margin and demand forecasting to determine the size of the day ahead and within day total error compared to the reserve holding policy for the past year.
Days like 8 January make the answers to these questions critical, otherwise blackout risks will only grow as the energy transition progresses, and the public will not be quick to forgive blackouts caused by modelling failures.
I read somewhere on the brilliant David Turver blog that there is the ability to magically create a 10% buffer at a system level by altering the voltage – he said it is very expensive but can get you past a crisis. Is this accurate, and if so does that explain some of the NESO irritation? Are they sitting there with reserve options that havent been deployed yet? If so we may be some years from a blackout happening through poor planning arent we? Isnt the key not to damage the credibility of the sceptical community by overreaching in predicting a blackout when they have shots in the locker that mean a chunk of the 28GW Gas and the remaining nuclear will have to close before things get really tight?
Robert,
reducing voltage does not necessarily reduce load. Motors are a prime example reduce voltage and current rises and hence load. .
Many thanks, that’s very helpful.
Lots of electronic stuff will do similar, laptop chargers, PC power supplies etc. Most new-ish stuff with a switch mode power supply has ‘universal’ input voltage, if you look at the label it’ll say something like input 100-240v, 50-60Hz. Ostensibly this means you can ship just one PSU to any location in the world (unless it’s a wall-wart with a local plug molded in) and it’ll work. If you’re in a 120v country it just draws a lot more current than it does in a 240v country
Closing down all our coal powered stations means we have lost the plot
In my view there was nothing, amazing, about making our country vulnerable to the weather, this is just plain stupid.
I’m just watching a new video on YouTube featuring Kathryn on the Unherd channel
You cannot forecast or account for faults on the sytem or their magnitude and possible downstream effects.
The grid is far more susceptible to frequency fluctuation because we have lost so much inertia, i.e. it is less stable.
I cannot see how this can continue with Mr Milliband’s policies without a catastrophe occuring.
Neso must surely know how bad the system is becoming, so why do they not tell the government this is not going to work? This has puzzled me for a long time, it employs engineers who well know the risks and downsides of too much asynchronous generation.
Any NESO engineers reading this blog like to comment?
NESO are very complacent about inertia. They have plans to reduce it to as low as 95GVAs in order to operate a zero carbon mode. That means that the effects of interconnector or power station trips will speed up pro rata – there will be less time to institute corrective action to prevent a sharp frequency fall risking setting off the tranches of automated disconnection that start at 48.8Hz which we saw in action in August 2019. In practice, they are a little more cautious in that they reserve lower inertia operation for when demand is lower. So far they appear to have maintained 4 seconds (dividing inertia by demand) as a minimum level, and a little higher than that when demand is actually at its lowest, which is potentially a more risky time, in that losing 1.4GW of interconnector is a larger proportion of the demand total.
Possibly of interest to you, Kathryn.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chrisbond/p/great-britain-reality?r=om40y&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
“Days like 8 January make the answers to these questions critical, otherwise blackout risks will only grow as the energy transition progresses, and the public will not be quick to forgive blackouts caused by modelling failures”
Hi all….Missing in action; energy minister Ed Miliband.
Thanks Kathryn for another excellent deep analysis of what’s really happening.
You highlight 8th January was a serious near blackout miss.
I’m sure there are others, like the loss of Heysham 2 reactors 7 or 8 maybe both (23/12/2024)
Fortunately within the Christmas period, a working day would have been a different story.
Based on Kathryn’s excellent post, here’s my ballpark of a possible outcome.
Penwortham south of Preston is 100 miles from the Scottish border near Carlisle at Harker substation.
Two 400kv circuits link Penwortham & Harker substations with a tee off point at Lancaster to facilitate Heysham 1.
Penwortham is a major substation & marshalling point for supergrid circuits.
East/West over the Pennines to Yorkshire, South taking in Manchester, Liverpool conurbations, North Wales/Anglesey etc.
Assuming the submarine facility at Barrow & Sellafield nuclear waste & storage facility have effective on site back up. It’s my reckoning the loss of Heysham at a different timeline would have necessitated a North/South split & black out north of Penwortham.
Barry Wright, Lancashire.
As you cannot plan or cover the possibility of a fault that makes planning almost impossible.
The timing of any fault can also affect the effect, luck actually plays a big part in how severe the disruption is.
It does not help the stability of the grid that much inertia has been lost with the closure of conventional generators.
I cannot see how we can keep adding more asynchronous wind without agravating an already less stable grid.
I have, for some time, wondered why the system operator goes along with government plans as it is so detrimental to the grid. Any NESO engineers reading this blog care to comment?
NESO, NG and its predecessor CEGB were top class in their development of system analysis modelling on computers to run multiple scenarios of generation and transmission failures and what it would do to grid stability so the system could be configured and loaded to prevent a system collapse if any scenario were to arise. This is what drives system margin requirements and the locational need and has been key to “keeping the lights on”. If the grid control engineers are now being supressed then this is a very unsatisfactory turn of events. Thus im hoping at tomorrows operational transparency forum NESO they will explain how the day unfolded on the 8th and they will answer Kathryn’s pertinent question and put this to bed.
Sadly they only explained up to about 4pm and not what actually happened to delivery. That was deliberate. I’m putting together another blog…
It has long been standard practice to evaluate how the grid would operate on an N-1 basis. That is the calculations are run assuming each power station in turn is not available, and likewise each transmission link. That is feasible, and historically all that was really required, since the system had sufficient resilience (e.g. inertia, spare transmission capacity) to avoid the loss of more than one asset at a time, allowing recalculation against the next event. However, if you then have to calculate an N-2 result for each N-1 case, and an N-3 result for each N-2 case… the computations required explode exponentially.
In August 2019 the first loss was almost 800 MW at Hornsea 1, rapidly followed almost immediately by 3 stages of loss a few seconds apart at Little Bar CCGT and a large volume of embedded wind generation. This was way beyond the contingencies they had calculated for.
Much the sane appears to be true of the frequency incident on 22nd December 2023 which resulted in 60 seconds where the frequency was recorded as being below the statutory minimum of 49.5Hz. Started by a trip of the IFA1 interconnector at Sellindge in Kent, it cascaded into the Cottam CCGT in the Midlands and the Moray HVDC interconnector to offshore wind in Northern Scotland. Observers seem to think there was also a significant loss of embedded generation that NESO have not admitted to as not being on the transmission high voltage grid. These are beyond N-1 contingencies.
I’m just going to make a comment regarding the over production of energy on windy days, called curtailment bills.
Now I have solar panels and a storage battery through E.ON
During the Winter, when solar generation is low, instead of switching off all the turbines, why not let some of the excess electricity be used to charge up storage batteries at a very low rate.
This would then reduce the amount of windmills that have to be turned off.
Although the producers would still have to be paid the full market rate for those not turned off, it might work out cheaper for consumers overall as the income generated from those having their solar batteries charged at night, could be netted off against what would have been paid for for curtailment fees.
Another benefit would be that fully charged batteries for 1000s of households would take pressure off the grid during tight winter days.
Each power company would have a record of all customers who have solar panels and batteries, so will know how much excess ekectrucy is needed to charge the fleet of batteries during sunless periods.
This does happen already on an opportunistic basis. But wind surpluses can be as high as 7GW (the highest recorded for a half hour in 2024) already, and will only get higher as more capacity is added – solar too will become a problem in the sunniest months. We currently have batteries that can absorb up to 4GW, if they are set to charge at maximum rate and the power can be routed to them. But they are spread out rather than being located in the areas of highest wind connection. The reason is that intermittency surpluses are highly variable, and as yet not that frequent, which makes it hard for a battery to get sufficient opportunities to charge up and discharge at a price differential that more than covers its round trip losses if it is dedicated to storing wind surpluses. This is the same problem as the poor economics of hydrogen electrolysers.
Batteries make more money by charging up and discharging at much shorter timescales to help handle the effects of wind gustiness and other elements that lead to grid frequency wobbles on timescales of seconds to minutes, and by being ready to help adjust supply in the Balancing Mechanism. There is an overlay of charging up cheaply and discharging when prices are high which also applies to pumped storage which operates at least daily, giving more opportunities for profit. At times you could be waiting weeks for a wind surplus to store.
Thank you for your detailed reply.
I still have many concerns about wind power.
The Government talks of tripling the amount of turbines, but over the festive period I saw generation drop as low as 1.65GW.
So even if you triple that it still adds up to very little, and means a lot of gas imports.
I still maintain that we should have kept around 8 coal powered stations operating.
We may still regret not doing so.
Great article. I shall be referencing on our Say No To Scout Moor 2 website. A small point, could you expand on some of the acronyms. New readers coming from our site may find the acronyms hard to understand.
Hi,
Just want to say that this is a great article – and the scary takeaway is two fold, that (i) the frequency excursions, are increasing; and (ii) NESO have caught their political masters’ disease of putting more effort in to window dressing than actually doing what they are paid to do.
Very scary stuff.
As you note, your article has had an incredible impact and the main-stream media have picked it up.
I recall when we used to try and pick the TRIADs (to manage DSR) and reliance on forecast demand data was a bit of a challenge to say the least.
This merely an observation and it could be coincidence but the wholesale price as experienced through the Agile Octopus rate has ended up being capped ay 99.99p on multiple occasions recently during the peak and now on one occasion outside of the peak. This contrasts with a maximum of 85p on one occasion in 2022 during the peak of the energy crisis. In the press there was the reporting of generator bids of over £5000 / MWh. I know the latter was caused by Germany being short of power but I get the distinct feeling that there is a level of desparation / poor planning call it what you want but it needs to be fixed before we end with blackouts and the NESO throwing up their hands saying Well, we didn’t expect that to happen. Since 2014 we have done the most amazing thing in weaning ourselves completely off of coal but somewhere along the line we seem to have failed in another part of the vastly complex generating machine. Have we lost the plot?
I used to work in production with some processes that were variable, but after some development work, you find out the important parameters to control, but then you find once you get those parameters controlled, so many other measures just aren’t needed, In fact for some processes you can get to a stage where you just have to get the correct starting conditions, and then it turns out very consistent results/high yield product.
If we have a power generation system based on wind and solar, and even nuclear working at their normal output (even if variable) based on their technical performance parameters, and we can have enough storage (won’t go into the debate of economics or £/MWh for the system), and you set up the storage to deal with electrical excess, when storage is charged, and discharge when there is a deficiency.
The storage system operator has to control the their processes to maintain system frequency.
At this point in time, with such a system, does NESO become redundant? or, you have to ask the question, how big an organisation would NESO need to be? and, how many of its present functions would need to be retained?
If you have dumb solar PV and dumb wind power, and nuclear, all cranking out as much as they can 24/7/365 even if wind and solar outputs are variable, does the storage system operator defacto become the System Operator?
With such a system, where is any prediction needed if the storage operator has to deal with all events and eventualities, and they ramp up and down, either in storage or in discharge mode to maintain the grid frequency, making all peaking plant redundant?
With such a system, how many layers of system management would we need?
An interesting question. NESO seem to think that neural networks will have an important role to play. As they admit a grid with a lot of wind and solar and other inverter based resources ends up with a lot of high frequency components that can be difficult to manage, especially when they add – basically the reason that Hornsea 1 tripped out in August 2019 when a lightning strike caused a sharp transient spike. See this story:
https://www.current-news.co.uk/neso-uses-neural-networks-for-grid-stability/
Neural networks depend heavily on a suitable design of network and adequate training data. The data may or may not be enough to predict what happens when the real world shows a pattern outside the envelope of the training data. So it may manage while excursions are adequately predictable, but could fail catastrophically. The modelling ceases to be based on physical principles that are well understood. Even following physical models gets computationally intractable at the required speed, with calculations liable to blow up inaccurately (see also climate models, butterfly effect etc.)..
Kathryn, the YouTube algorithm pushed me to your recent interview on UnHerd. You came across well and effectively explained some very technical detail. I was concerned in October when I picked apart the Winter Outlook to see our reliance on I/C capacity and the relatively small proportion of dispatchable capacity in general and I would not be surprised if NESO had significant noise in its numbers. Like many others in the industry, I view CP2030 as something of a pipe dream. Perhaps it would be more generous to its proponents that they are reaching for the stars and hoping for a moon shot but there are serious consequences that we are already seeing play out, and we haven’t really started yet. While you only need one component to fail (e.g. mis-pricing AR7+, failure to deliver planning consent, lack of skilled labour, non-delivery on supply chain, failure to connect etc etc) and you don’t get the new Wind capacity turning up, the promise of 5% LF for Gas by 2030 will massively impact the willingness of Gas plant to invest even in life extension CAPEX, let alone build new capacity. If we are tight now (and I think you are right, NESO did not have much of cushion on 8th Jan), it can only get worse as firm capacity declines. Ironically the £5,000/MWh BM payments may be the thing that saves it as the market realises the opportunity available. 5% LF at £5,000/MWh would probably work for most generators! That’s kind of the point though, we will probably muddle through but at tremendous cost…never mind, Gov can always blame ‘fat cat’ energy Suppliers. This was always something that bugged me when I used to price up electricity supply contracts and was looking at rising RO/CfD/DUoS costs. There is much to be critical about our Retail market, and the Supply businesses but it was galling to see them being used as a cat’s paw for putting through the cost of the energy transition – just be honest with people!
“You came across well and effectively explained some very technical detail”
Hi…totally agree, no fact left unexplained in a complicated area. A couple of minor points if I may.
Gas was considered a refined finite fuel with direct application. Burning gas to generate electricity was never in favour pre. 1990 by the CEGB. Privatisation opened the doors big time to the CCGT era.
Loss of supply due to power plant failures I agree featured throughout the video however the super-grid network is far more vulnerable & can suffer major multi faults leading to blackouts.
Thanks Kathryn for a really interesting discussion on video.
Particularly like your reference to the success of Korean projects; take a look at this:
jackdevanney@substack.com
Little wonder we are behind the curve on nuclear builds.
Barry Wright, Lancashire.
Apologises all….Korean link referred in my recent reply post to should read:
rbe;https://open.substack.com/pub/jackdevanney/p/what-if-tanker-crew-deaths-are-intolerable?r=31whpy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Barry Wright, Lancashire.
Thanks for your input on UnHerd with Freddie. You appear to be asking the hard questions, but it must feel like you’re shouting into the wind. And if you’ll pardon the metaphor, it appears that the public is facing a “blackout” on easily understood details and why chasing Net Zero is a fool’s errand. You were a most fascinating person to listen to.
Thank you so much! I doubled my (small) X /twitter followers in a week and gained hundreds of new subscribers here and connections on LinkedIn in the past week, so the message is getting out. I also contributed to the Urgent Question asked by Andrew Bowie in the Commons this week and have asked Ofgem to push NESO to be transparent about the units it had in reserve on 8 January. The lack of transparency, and the pretency at transparency is staggering. These are simple questions but they are refusing to answer them!
I am reading gridwatch correctly, or, are all our turbines down for maintainence.
Is says that our vast fleet is only generating 0.11GW at the moment.
84MW was the recorded low in the real time metered wind fleet at 8:45a.m. Those are the numbers Gridwatch picks up which miss many smaller onshore wind farms, but they are likely to have joined many others not able to cut in.
Thank you.
By ‘cut in’ do you mean that there was some issue affecting their ability to join the actual grid.
84MW is still distressingly low, even if Ed Miliband succeeds in tripling the size of the fleet.
I wonder how much the offshore turbines cost to maintain
Cut in speed is the lowest speed at which the blades will spin, overcoming the friction in the bearings and the resistance from the electromagnetic fields in the generator. As it is, the power output and efficiency remain very low at low wind speeds. Here’s a chart for a 3MW turbine designed for lower wind speeds that shows the efficiency (the y axis is a measure of the output relative to the theoretical maximum output for the wind speeds known as the Betz limit) at various windspeeds. Mouseover the points and the output is revealed. Once generator maximum output is achieved the extra wind energy gets wasted, reducing the efficiency. at 25m/sec the turbine cuts out because the wind is too strong for safe operation.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/GqyyC/1/
Reply to – It doesn’t add up
Thanks for your help. You didn’t have a reply option on your post though.
Is it possible that the mystery generators are assets of the Local Distribution Networks? They would reduce demand on the National Network, and are likely not listed as National Network assets. Rather like embedded wind and solar. I used to live near what I believe is a 50 MW gas-fired generator available to the Local Distributor.
As you say, they show up as a reduction in TS demand. On 8 January demand was higher than the NESO forecast!
How many companies and NHS hospitals have back-up generators that could be used to reduce demand at a fraction of the price instead of calling on privatized generators at a rate of £5000/Mwh?
Back-up generators have to be run from time to time, what is the embedded capacity of back-up generation?
Impressive read, Neso need to get there act together and focus on improvements, not just drone on about the same old same old.
if you have attended one of their meetings you can see no foresight and little contribution to what’s happening moving forward such as new connections becoming available, the introduction of battery use onto the grid etc. as as for nuclear outages its like they don’t exist, we just accept the outages as the norm now, we need to replace the lost coal contribution to the grid but no mention of anything new coming., seems like a lot of people just listening to a few droning on about nothing new and nothing interesting and nothing important that’s for sure. we need to know what’s coming when its coming and keep pressure on it to make sure it happens!
“we need to replace the lost coal contribution to the grid but no mention of anything new coming.,”
Hi all……Really….the “new” was always there but seldom acknowledged, however we are rapidly losing ground IMO.
Can anyone on this learned forum explain why electricity generated by nuclear energy has such a low profile here in the UK ? I watch, listen to a range of news channels daily for balance. Apart from a passing reference nuclear hardly gets a mention; why is this ?
Chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves interviewed on the today programme this morning (30/1) BBC R4. Topics sustainable aviation fuel ie Heathrow 3rd runway & net zero. The high cost of energy is restricting UK growth. What a surprise. Net zero introduced renewables into the debate, on shore wind, solar, carbon capture & storage, gas, green hydrogen, again no reference to nuclear, a low fuel cost, low carbon source of energy that’s been heating 1 in 5 of UK homes for the past 30 years whatever the weather 24/7/365. Kathryn’s reference of nuclear power plants providing major electricity generation from a relative small geographical area is an excellent point.The existing nuclear fleet plugged into the main super grid spine for example. Apart from accelerating & pushing through planning for 100’s of on shore wind turbines associated additional major infrastructure to harvest the output & deliver to the super grid, is seldom acknowledged & I’m not sure public opinion will take this lightly. Lots more overhead lines, towers, substations, vehicle access roads etc. Groups of off shore wind farms collect to a collection platform then deliver to the mainland. For instance Barrow off shore wind farm delivers 90MW via sea cables making landfall at Heysham 1 & 2 nuclear power station sites & plugging in to the existing 400kv supergrid.
Now that makes sense.
Barry Wright, Lancashire.