Renew On Line (UK) 46

Extracts from NATTA's journal
Renew, issue 146 Nov-Dec 2003

2.UK Power Crash?

Will the UK power system fail to meet demand for electricity- as happened in the NE of the US this  summer? The subsequent brief blackout in London in August  certainly worried a lot of people. So could a major crash happen here?

The US system crash was due in part to deregulation and the competitive pressures that it stimulated- the system was operating with supply only just meeting demand and very little investment in new plant or grid link infrastructure, despite a 30% increase in demand in recent years. During the heat wave, when the air-conditioning load rose, the grid suffered a local outage which then cascaded across the system, shutting it all down in seconds. 

In the UK, NETA, the New Electricity Trading Arrangements, introduced two years ago, have created a somewhat similar situation- competitive pressures have forced wholesale electricity prices down to an all time low, with the result that many generators simply cannot afford to run, including several CHP plants (see later) and some renewable energy projects.  About 7.5 GW of conventional capacity has also been mothballed. Tragically it seems that some operators have been switching off cleaner gas fired plants in favour of older coal plants- whose capital costs have long since been amortised. But these are the most polluting plants. Most of the UK’s other generators are losing money- including British Energy’s nuclear plants, which it seems are loosing £4 for each MWh sold, but are, in effect, being subsidised by the government. 

Fortunately we have such a large excess generating capacity overall that there is no immediate risk of power shortages, at least not in technical terms. In all we have 80GW available, whereas peak winter demand is less than 60 GW.  But, as noted above, some of this excess capacity is mothballed or out of operation, and it will take time to get back into service, should it be needed. In theory, when and if a shortfall looms, generators are expected to bring extra capacity on line.  The National Grid company has issued warnings several times over the last year about the inadequacy of the plant margin- it has dropped from 20% to 16% in England and Wales on average, but occasionally has got less than that. And with demand peaks continuing to grow in some sectors, including air conditioning, the safety margin is reducing. A cold winter could tip us over. 

To summarise, as in the USA, there is no overall shortage of generation capacity, but much of it has been forced out of play by NETA.  As in the USA we are sailing close to the wind.

Reactions

Sir Alec Broers, president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, took the opportunity to insist, in the Times 18th Aug., that the governments plans to generate 20% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020 were unrealistic and investment in nuclear power was critical if shortages were to be avoided. He felt that the Government was wrong to see nuclear and renewable energy as mutually exclusive- he said that we will need both.  We also needed to keep working on fusion, although he admitted that ‘the engineering problems of this still remain extreme’.  But he also saw problems with renewables ‘We can’t just put up wind turbines and generate a lot of electricity for free. We will need to redesign the grid, set up reserves for when the wind isn’t blowing strongly enough, learn how to store power.’

The letters pages of the daily press also had some interesting reactions. Thus, at one extreme, the Scotsman 19 August,  had  a letter  from John Stewart claiming that ‘the widespread black out in North America must surely alert us to the grave dangers of renewable energy’ and another from Alan Clayton arguing that ‘there can be little doubt that the asinine determination to build no further nuclear plants, coupled with the burgeoning wind farm psychosis, is sooner or later going to give us the same, or probably worse’. On the other side, SERA member David Ross reminded Guardian readers that  SERA had called for ‘the reintroduction of at least some state-owned power stations as insurance against the failure of the privatised sector, either from lack of capacity or from bankruptcy’.