National Grid warns of possible blackouts

[Ediswan]

How do you think that beer’s kept cool? Just out of interest how many cellars and cold rooms have you had to look after? Because it’s really not as simple as you make out.

Chillers are not compulsory. Beer festivals for example. There are still some pubs where the ale is served direct from barrels behind the bar.

A great uncle was a publican. His view was that running a pub was hard work for poor money, retired to the LVNH at Denham.

 

[Dai Corner]

Chillers are not compulsory. Beer festivals for example. There are still some pubs where the ale is served direct from barrels behind the bar.

A great uncle was a publican. His view was that running a pub was hard work for poor money, retired to the LVNH at Denham.

I avoid beers that have to be cooled to near freezing to be palatable.

On-topic: I'm using well under £2 a day on energy. The £66 a month discount more than pays my bill

 

[Sm5]

Have you actually ever seen the size of files created by modern desktop productivity software? I just saved a completely blank Word document and it's 12KiB.

It could be 4kb but theres padding, duplication, meta data and checksums in that.

and for the last week back under £100 / MWh.

If it stays as low as it has this week for the NR t few months (unlikely, but you never know…) there will even be downward pressure on energy bills.

when was the last time energy bills came down in a near monopoly market ?
All the competition has gone from the market, fried out during last winter.
convienient for the remaining suppliers.

Nothing ever comes down… it might stagnate, and the govt tells us they worked extremely hard to keep prices at the same level etc….

Dont forget hinkey was sold on a minimum price promise to EDF,

The subsidy deal guarantees EDF a price of £92.50 for every megawatt hour of electricity it produces, when it eventually opens, for the first 35 years of its life.

EDF pushes UK government to alter Hinkley Point C penalty clauses

Utility sees Covid as ‘force majeure’ event that should allow contract trigger dates to be pushed back

www.ft.com

So the price we have is here to stay. The profits goes back to the French government… obne reason for arguing an increase in VAT and reduction in corporation taxes to ensure some tax revenue stays here.

There is extra pork we are being fed in the article, the station was supposed to go online by 2025 in the original deal, the FT talks about 2029 and later and EDF is seeking ”1” year covid forgiveness.. but which year would that be .. 2025/6/7/8 or 2029 unless my maths is wrong ?

Hinkley Point C

Contracts for the Hinkley Point C, which from 2025 is expected to provide 3.2GW of clean, reliable, electricity generation capacity.

www.gov.uk

 

[cjmillsnun]

Did in 2021 and 2020, didn't we?

Risk of UK power cuts this winter has increased, says National Grid

Industry bosses concerned energy crisis may cause production slowdowns and factory shutdowns

www.theguardian.com

Extract from 2021 news story...



And a year or so previously...

UK faces energy shortfall and possible blackouts | New Civil Engineer

A 740Mw energy shortfall was expected to occur last night, with additional generators encouraged to come online to balance the grid. As such, National

www.newcivilengineer.com

Extract from 2020 web story....



And there was also much media discussion following the major outage affecting London and much of the South East on 9 August 2019.

Granted that's only a two or three year timeframe, but perhaps it's becoming a developing trend?!

Spot on... Most of the time, it gets buried, but becaue of the Ukrainian war, there is a slightly higher chance on a very very cold day that we could face a 3 hour cut. This winter is predicted to be mild.

Thing is if there was world gas shortage why has the world gas price dropped to 192p/therm down from the eye watering 700+p/therm in September. No mention of this in the media who happily shouted the high price from the rooftops. Anybody think the media is looking for a major crisis to panic the public after covid. Also maybe if they stopped demolishing gas holders we would have somewhere to store gas. We could by it in bulk when it was cheap.

Gas holders are only good for low volume local very short term storage. They can only store gas up to a maximum pressure of 75 millibars. In most cases they used water to seal. Leaving dry natural gas in there would make it absorb the water and burn less efficiently, also the water in the cups would evaporate and the gas would escape. Hence they were normally filled overnight and emptied the day after so that the lands ended up back in the water tanks to refill the cups. They were decommissioned for a good reason. They were inefficient and required a lot of maintenance. Instead we store gas at high pressure in the local transmission systems (typically up to 38 bar) allowing a much greater volume of gas to be stored and for it to be able to be moved across a large area.

Modern gas hobs /ovens will not suffer from this as a problem as they have flame detection devices

There are still boilers around with pilot lights and some can be a real pain to relight

It's not just the property you have to consider. The distribution system would need to be purged back to gas. Depending on how much had gone, you could be talking days to get all the air purged out.

 

[Bald Rick]

Dont forget hinkey was sold on a minimum price promise to EDF,

It wasn’t. It was sold on a strike price promise.

If the wholesale price is below the strike price, Govt makes up the difference. If the wholesale price is above the strike price (as it has been for well over a year) then EDF pays Govt the extra.

 

[Noddy]

It wasn’t. It was sold on a strike price promise.

If the wholesale price is below the strike price, Govt makes up the difference. If the wholesale price is above the strike price (as it has been for well over a year) then EDF pays Govt the extra.

My understanding is the strike price rises with inflation and in September 2021 the BBC were reporting it at £106/MWh* (so it will be even higher now) but the daily average price is now back down to around £60-70MWh. Who knows where we’ll be when it finally opens but one way or the other Hinckley C is going to be a bit a financial disaster for someone.

* Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-58724732

 

[Bald Rick]

My understanding is the strike price rises with inflation and in September 2021 the BBC were reporting it at £106/MWh* (so it will be even higher now) but the daily average price is now back down to around £60-70MWh. Who knows where we’ll be when it finally opens but one way or the other Hinckley C is going to be a bit a financial disaster for someone.

* Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-58724732

Yes it does rise with inflation, as all strike prices do.

 

[DelW]

According to "Old Sparky" in the current Private Eye* the price has hit its nominal limit of £6,000 per MWh on multiple occasions, and has gone as high as £8,000 at times. Presumably that's a transient price at peaks, it doesn't say how long that price lasted.

(*paper copy so I can't post a link)

 

[Dai Corner]

According to "Old Sparky" in the current Private Eye* the price has hit its nominal limit of £6,000 per MWh on multiple occasions, and has gone as high as £8,000 at times. Presumably that's a transient price at peaks, it doesn't say how long that price lasted.

(*paper copy so I can't post a link)

I've taken a photo of the article but don't have time to transcribe or OCR it at the moment I'm afraid.

 

[Bald Rick]

According to "Old Sparky" in the current Private Eye* the price has hit its nominal limit of £6,000 per MWh on multiple occasions, and has gone as high as £8,000 at times. Presumably that's a transient price at peaks, it doesn't say how long that price lasted.

(*paper copy so I can't post a link)

Typically it’s for a 30 minute period. Also that isn’t a national figure, as to balance the grid NG will buy power from generators (or other countries via interconnectors) wherever it is most needed. For example last winter they paid a massive sum for a half hour of power from Belgium, to balance the grid in London and Kent. I suspect that the figures quoted in this week’s Eye are similar examples.

 

[Trackman]

Got a letter from the electricity distributor today about possible planned blackouts for winter.
I'm on rota 'B' and when it goes off it will be only once a day for a minimum of 3 hours.

Anyone else had these letters?

 

[Peter Mugridge]

Anyone else had these letters?

Not yet, but given the ongoing post strikes....

 

[DelW]

Got a letter from the electricity distributor today about possible planned blackouts for winter.
I'm on rota 'B' and when it goes off it will be only once a day for a minimum of 3 hours.

Anyone else had these letters?

Not so far, but considering that temperatures are well down and there's been little wind in recent days (so presumably not much output from the wind turbines), I'm slightly surprised that we haven't seen any planned outages yet (AFAIK).

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

Not so far, but considering that temperatures are well down and there's been little wind in recent days (so presumably not much output from the wind turbines), I'm slightly surprised that we haven't seen any planned outages yet (AFAIK).

Fortunately still have a bit of wind tonight and clearly we are prepared to pay top dollar currently as all interconnectors, even the French, are on import mode. We have c45GW of dispatchable thermal generation plus c3GW of coal this winter so we are sailing close to the wind as highest demand so far is 44GW. Thus if our neighbours aren't able to deliver when wind is negligible and its extremely cold that is when we are exposed to possible rolling outages.

 

[Ostrich]

Got a letter from the electricity distributor today about possible planned blackouts for winter.
I'm on rota 'B' and when it goes off it will be only once a day for a minimum of 3 hours.

Anyone else had these letters?

Not had a specific letter like that, but I have had a flyer with the post from SSEN advising "what to do in the event of a blackout".

Regarding the rotas, I am also a "B". There was a useful (for once!) article in the Daily Mail about this a month or so ago. Every postcode has a letter designated, I think there were around 16 or so letters in use.
The DM published examples of various rotas showing escalating stages of blackouts giving the 3-hour slots when your "letter" would be off. From memory, at the lowest level of disruption, you'd be off for 3 x 3 hour periods in a week.

Not all suppliers do this apparently, but you may be able to find your rota "letter" printed on your electricity bill. It's a rather innocuous-looking capital letter in a square box.
Eon Next don't show it, but my previous supplier, NPower did. A mate on the other side of the county told me he's with British Gas for electric, and his bill showed he was an "N".

 

[Trackman]

Not had a specific letter like that, but I have had a flyer with the post from SSEN advising "what to do in the event of a blackout".

I got a similar thing inside the letter.

The DM published examples of various rotas showing escalating stages of blackouts giving the 3-hour slots when your "letter" would be off. From memory, at the lowest level of disruption, you'd be off for 3 x 3 hour periods in a week.

Blimey it's like going back 50 years!
My mum used to take us to various relatives depending on the 'rota', usually my nans. The 'rotas' were printed in the local newspapers.

If it was a night rota, I had a battery 'night light'.

 

[yorksrob]

You're lucky - my supplier has only sent me one piece of correspondence since I was moved onto them several years ago.

 

[Mogster]

Fortunately still have a bit of wind tonight and clearly we are prepared to pay top dollar currently as all interconnectors, even the French, are on import mode. We have c45GW of dispatchable thermal generation plus c3GW of coal this winter so we are sailing close to the wind as highest demand so far is 44GW. Thus if our neighbours aren't able to deliver when wind is negligible and its extremely cold that is when we are exposed to possible rolling outages.

Switzerland is reported to be considering limiting EV usage to essential only to limit charging. I really don’t see how that would work in practice and I’d imagine EV sales would plummet.

 

[philthetube]

I got my letter via email.

 

[wilbers]

Switzerland is reported to be considering limiting EV usage to essential only to limit charging. I really don’t see how that would work in practice and I’d imagine EV sales would plummet.

Why, surely its just a matter of charging when other demand isn't high (such as overnight)?

 

[philosopher]

Fortunately still have a bit of wind tonight and clearly we are prepared to pay top dollar currently as all interconnectors, even the French, are on import mode. We have c45GW of dispatchable thermal generation plus c3GW of coal this winter so we are sailing close to the wind as highest demand so far is 44GW. Thus if our neighbours aren't able to deliver when wind is negligible and its extremely cold that is when we are exposed to possible rolling outages.

Is part of the plan to tell high energy users to stop using or use less electricity if supply is particularly tight to avoid the need for rolling blackouts?

 

[Bald Rick]

Is part of the plan to tell high energy users to stop using or use less electricity if supply is particularly tight to avoid the need for rolling blackouts?

Yes, and that has been the case for many years.

 

[nw1]

Fortunately still have a bit of wind tonight and clearly we are prepared to pay top dollar currently as all interconnectors, even the French, are on import mode. We have c45GW of dispatchable thermal generation plus c3GW of coal this winter so we are sailing close to the wind as highest demand so far is 44GW. Thus if our neighbours aren't able to deliver when wind is negligible and its extremely cold that is when we are exposed to possible rolling outages.

Of course, still a fair chance that the most difficult period (presumably January and early February) could be mild. Cold weather now does not necessarily mean a cold winter overall, and since the late 80s, mild has been the norm.

 

[najaB]

Of course, still a fair chance that the most difficult period (presumably January and early February) could be mild. Cold weather now does not necessarily mean a cold winter overall, and since the late 80s, mild has been the norm.

Both parts of that statement are true, though neither is any use in predicting what this winter will be like.

Brian Gaze's seasonal forecast for this winter is for temperatures to be a bit lower than the 1981-2010 average. I have found his forecasts to be generally pretty reliable in the past (though, of course, that doesn't mean he'll be right this time). He also outlined a possible scenario where a cold start to December results in a persistent cold dome building over Europe that blocks mild air from the west, and it's not looking too warm across the pond just now.

 

[philosopher]

and it's not looking too warm across the pond just now.

I always thought cold weather in North America fired up the jet stream due to a strong temperature contrast between North America and the Eastern Atlantic. In this case we would get mild and windy weather which would be good for the energy situation.

 

[Ostrich]

Just a quick update on the discussion upthread of blackout rotas.
I've just found that Eon Next do display the rota letter on my on-line bills; it's described as a "postcode area alpha identifier" .
Hidden away on page 2 with no other explanation ......!

 

[AM9]

Just a quick update on the discussion upthread of blackout rotas.
I've just found that Eon Next do display the rota letter on my on-line bills; it's described as a "postcode area alpha identifier" .
Hidden away on page 2 with no other explanation ......!

Yes, so is mine. It's on page two at the head of the Electricity part of ther statement because it only affects electricity. In tyhe even of e planned disconnection, they communication would presumably tell account holders where to look for the post code alpha identifier.

 

[Trackman]

I've found this at https://propertychecker.co.uk/blackout-checker/
I don't know how accurate this information is, so take with a pinch of salt if need be.

So for my SExx xxx postcode under a level one disconnection plan for 'rota B' is ..

Variable Rota Disconnection Plan​

Disconnection Time Blocks for load block B​

Under the Level 1 Disconnection plans, properties in load block B could be disconnected for 3 hour periods throughout the week.

Day	Disconnection Periods
Monday	6:30 AM - 9:30 AM 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Wednesday	3:30 AM - 6:30 AM

The disconnection periods above are for the lowest level of disconnection (Level 1). Disconnection periods will increase at different levels as detailed in the Electricity Supply Emergency Code.
Select another Block

Properties in this Area​

Select your address to view more information about your property.

 

[WAB]

I've found this at https://propertychecker.co.uk/blackout-checker/
I don't know how accurate this information is, so take with a pinch of salt if need be.

So for my SExx xxx postcode under a level one disconnection plan for 'rota B' is ..

It matches up with the Electricity Supply Emergency Code.

 

[apinnard]

I’m seeing reports, albeit only on Twitter, that National Grid are projecting electricity generation and import shortfalls tomorrow between 5 and 7pm.

If grid frequency falls below tolerable levels, could we end up with another night like 9th August 2019 with electric traction shutting down and refusing to work?