I always think that the railway should go back to generating its own power supplies anyway, and use the grid as a backup. This was the case in the early days, and is still the case in Switzerland and Germany and was recently the case with London Underground.
It's going to be interesting in the next few years to see if the grid will remain reliable, considering the forthcoming energy crunch. As usual there is no joined up thinking in Government who plan electric cars and replacing gas central heating with electricity, yet it will be a miracle if the current grid holds up.
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IN THE frigid opening days of 2009, Britain’s electricity demand peaked at 59 gigawatts (GW). Just over 45% of that came from power plants fuelled by gas from the North Sea. A further 35% or so came from coal, less than 15% from nuclear power and the rest from a hotch-potch of other sources. By 2015, assuming that modest economic growth resumes, a reasonable guess is that Britain will need around 64GW to cope with similar conditions. Where will that come from?
North Sea gas has served Britain well, but supply peaked in 1999. Since then the flow has fallen by half; by 2015 it will have dropped by two-thirds. By 2015 four of Britain’s ten nuclear stations will have shut and no new ones could be ready for years after that. As for coal, it is fiendishly dirty: Britain will be breaking just about every green promise it has ever made if it is using anything like as much as it does today. Renewable energy sources will help, but even if the wind and waves can be harnessed (and Britain has plenty of both), these on-off forces cannot easily replace more predictable gas, nuclear and coal power. There will be a shortfall—perhaps of as much as 20GW—which, if nothing radical is done, will have to be met from imported gas. A large chunk of it may come from Vladimir Putin’s deeply unreliable and corrupt Russia.
With gas too risky, coal too dirty, nuclear too slow and renewables too unreliable, Britain is in a bind. What can it do to get out of it? At this stage, there is no lightning-bolt solution, but two things would prevent matters from getting worse.
Many of Britain’s neighbours may find this rather amusing. Britain, the only big west European country that could have joined the oil producers’ club OPEC, the country that used to lecture the world about energy liberalisation, is heading towards South African-style power cuts, with homes and factories plunged intermittently into third-world darkness.
The first has to do with infrastructure. Companies must be cajoled or bribed into building gas storage. At the moment there is barely a week’s worth, so there is nothing to lessen the impact of price rises and the shenanigans of foreign powers. More cross-Channel power cables would help, allowing Britain to import electricity directly from its better-supplied neighbours (and also helping create a Europe-wide power grid, thus improving security for all EU members).
Second, carbon must be taxed if firms are to invest in long-term, expensive, technology-heavy projects such as nuclear plants, cleaning up coal and taming renewable sources of power. Carbon is already assigned a price through the European cap-and-trade mechanism, but the system is focused on the short term, vulnerable to gaming and plagued by hugely fluctuating prices. A tax on carbon is hardly going to stop the lights going out in a few years, but it would provide a floor price for power, giving investors a clearer sense of likely profits. In the meantime you know who to blame.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14167834
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14177328
