Vocal Voices

.... the lights might go off.

This time it is no joke. The National Grid says that it has only 1.2% spare capacity and is spending £36m to keep plants on standby and paying large users to switch off in order to try to achieve 5%.

Prof. Ian Wells, energy expert and former board member of the old CEGB, said that we once had 27% spare capacity, then it dropped to 20%, but when it got as low as 15% it was deemed critical. He blamed the dash for gas and the wind rush more than the gradual closure of coal plants. He also said that this was a known problem decades ago yet still we failed to replace and increase the infrastructure.

So 1.2% must be urgent and 5% is nowhere near enough, and through it all our bills will go up.

Of course it will cost more. Then, apparently, we'll use less of it, giving more capacity to spare.

Never mind those who can't afford to heat their homes in winter. I see that E-On dropped their StayWarm tarrif for over 60's in 2013.

EV anyone? It's an odd kind of surreal world where, on the one hand, we can talk about our energy reserves hitting less than 2% and on the other hand we can be trumpeting EV to replace cars. Just take a look at the fuel use as part of our energy landscape in MTOE (million tonnes of oil equivalent).

This is something which is NEVER EVER discussed when talking about reductions in CO2 emissions and Electricity generation. Just exactly how are we supposed to take that Petroleum and Transport segment out of the equation. OK there is rail in there which skews the figures, but at least 50% of that figure is private vehicles. Note table 4, Petroleum energy use is fully twice Electricity in terms of the balance of energy used in the UK.

Nobody is ever going to tell you the truth. Which is that we need 3* the current power generation capacity in the UK as a baseline if we are ever going to get rid of our fossil fuel addiction.

See anyone working on that????

Great. We destroy the UK coal industry, shut down viable coal powered stations in the pretence that windmills are going to take their place and then we find out we're running out of power.

WHAT a surprise.

Interesting, the UK's total energy has remained fairly flat for a number of years, but electricity has been on a slow but steady rise.

Going back to the interview I mentioned yesterday.

Wells stated the obvious when he said that wind power was intermittent. It can sometimes produce nearly 10% of our needs and sometimes less than 1%, but then came the clincher. The grid gives preference to wind power so that when it is producing electricity other forms have to be scaled back. The quickest and easiest way is to turn off or cut back gas generation. However, the combination of on/off and low wholesale gas prices means that they, all of them, are uneconomical to run and may of them are mothballed or have been shut down.

Yep all obvious. But the elephant in the room is that we have to triple our electricity production to meet our CO2 commitments.....

Nobody wants to talk about that. Mainly because it means that they aren't doing what needs to be done...