Greens Push UK Power Grid To The Brink Of Collapse

GWPF | 9 Nov 2015

Winter Blackout Fear As Power Chiefs Are Forced To Use Emergency Back-Up

National Grid used an emergency measure to keep the lights on for the first time yesterday after the unexpected shutdown of two power stations in northern England. Factories and other large consumers of power were paid to switch off or use back-up diesel generators to reduce the risk of blackouts. Energy experts expressed alarm that the notification had been issued so early in the winter season. Although National Grid sought to soothe fears of an impending crisis, peak demand last night was well below the winter peak of 54,200 megawatts that is expected during December and January. –Ben Webster and Robin Pagnamenta, The Times, 6 November 2015

1) Winter Blackout Fear As Power Chiefs Are Forced To Use Emergency Back-Up – The Times, 6 November 2015

2) Greens Push UK Power Grid To The Brink Of Collapse – The American Interest, 5 November 2015

3) Charles Moore: Obsession With Global Warming Will Put The Lights Out All over Britain – The Daily Telegraph, 8 November 2015

4) Matt Ridley: It’s Time For A U-Turn On Green Energy – The Times, 9 November 2015

5) Peter Hitchens: Warmists Armed With Windmills Are The Real Threat To Britain – Mail on Sunday, 8 November 2015

British grid operator National Grid made history this week when it was forced to ask some of its largest electricity consumers to decrease their usage to help cope with a spate of power outages. This is the sort of problem that will naturally arise in any country that tries to rush through a transition towards cleaner, greener energy sources. Wind and solar producers can only contribute intermittently, which is a tough quality to square with the most important demand of any power grid: consistency. There’s a real, tangible danger in being snookered by the policy advice of shallow-thinking greens. —The American Interest, 5 November 2015

Like most people – possibly everyone – who takes part in the global-warming debate, I do not know what will happen to the temperature of the Earth in a century’s time. What I do know, because it is plainly visible, is that the attempt to run the world as if we can control our eco-fate 100 years hence is statistically fantastical, politically impossible, economically ruinous and morally bogus. “The lights are going out all over Europe,” lamented Sir Edward Grey in 1914. That was because of a war. Now we are doing our best to put them out all over again, in the name of the common good. –Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph, 8 November 2015

The government needs to rethink its electricity policy. Last week’s emergency was a harbinger of worse to come: because the wind was not blowing on a mild autumn day, the National Grid had to call for some large electricity consumers to switch off, and in addition offered to pay up to £2,500 a megawatt-hour — 40 times the normal price — for generators capable of stepping into the breach at short notice. Among other lessons, this teaches us that letting Liberal Democrats run the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) for five years was an expensive mistake. What puzzles me is how little the current government seems to realise it must make a U-turn or get the blame itself. –Matt Ridley, The Times, 9 November 2015

As we squeak and gibber about the distant danger of terrorism, this country stands on the brink of a real threat to its economy, its daily life and its order. It is a threat we have brought on ourselves by embracing an obsessive, pseudo-scientific dogma, a dogma that is also destroying irreplaceable industries and jobs week by week. Last week we came within inches of major power blackouts. As I have pointed out here in the past, the world has seen this sort of madness before, when dogma has been allowed to veto common sense. This is what happened to the Soviet Union, which destroyed its economy and its society by trying to create Utopia. As usual, the result was hell. The inflexible, intolerant cause of Warmism is not as bad as Leninism. There is no Gulag, only a lot of self-righteous spite for any who dare to dissent. And who cannot sympathise with those who genuinely think they are saving the planet? But they aren’t. Do they really think, once the free Western countries sink into decay thanks to their policies, that a mighty China will pay any attention to their cries of protest? They are just hustling us into the Third World, while saving nothing at all. –Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 8 November 2015

1) Winter Blackout Fear As Power Chiefs Are Forced To Use Emergency Back-Up

The Times, 6 November 2015

Ben Webster and Robin Pagnamenta

National Grid declined to say which businesses had reduced power consumption but typically they would include oil refineries, smelters or steel foundries. The scheme is profitable for businesses, which were paid up to £2,500 per megawatt hour to switch off compared with a normal electricity price of about £50 per megawatt hour.

The measure, known as the demand side balancing reserve, was introduced last year to cope with the shortage of generating capacity and had not been used until yesterday.

Last month, it emerged that the operator of Britain’s high-voltage transmission network had been forced to boost the spare capacity of the system to prevent it from falling to only 1.2 per cent, the lowest level for at least a decade.

Several coal-fired power stations have closed in the past two years and much of the new generating capacity has been wind and solar farms, which are inherently unpredictable.

The shortage of electricity yesterday was amplified by a lack of wind power — the result of a low pressure front over the UK. All of Britain’s windfarms were generating just 300 megawatts of electricity, or 0.68 per cent of the nation’s total supplies yesterday evening.

Energy industry sources said that EDF Energy’s gas-fired power station at West Burton in Lincolnshire and a coal-fired plant at Rugeley in Staffordshire controlled by GDF Suez, were both unexpectedly out of action. Another plant, SSE’s 490 megawatt Fidler’s Ferry coal plant, had a “failure”.

The shortfall left National Grid engineers scrambling to meet demand. At lunchtime yesterday, National Grid also issued an emergency appeal to power stations for 500 megawatts more electricity between 4.30pm to 6.30pm, when there is a surge in demand as millions of people arrive home.

The alert — a notification of insufficient system margin — was the first issued since 2012. National Grid withdrew it after a few hours, saying “the market duly responded” and that it had reduced demand by 40 megawatts by using the balancing reserve.

Energy experts expressed alarm that the notification had been issued so early in the winter season. Although National Grid sought to soothe fears of an impending crisis, peak demand last night was well below the winter peak of 54,200 megawatts that is expected during December and January.

Peter Atherton, an energy analyst at Jefferies, the US investment bank, said that the emergency “could be the canary in the coal mine or it could be bad luck”. He added: “If it happens two or three times this winter it’s a sign that the system is under considerable stress.”

2) Greens Push UK Power Grid To The Brink Of Collapse
The American Interest, 5 November 2015

National Grid urged a group of heavy users, including businesses, factories and hospitals, to switch to back-up power or to reduce demand to meet the sudden lack of supply. Consumers responded by taking 40 megawatts of demand off the grid — partly by switching to back-up generators. […]

The measures highlighted the tightness of the margin between supply and demand in the UK, where old power plants have in the past decade been taken off the grid but not replaced quickly with alternatives. Coal-fired plants are being closed at a rapid pace, ahead of a 2023 deadline for compliance with new EU rules on air quality.

This is the sort of problem that will naturally arise in any country that tries to rush through a transition towards cleaner, greener energy sources. In the case of the UK, the shuttering of coal-fired power plants, a dirty but consistent source of baseload power, has decreased the country’s generating capacity enough that unforeseen outages can have wide-reaching, destabilizing effects on the grid.

If greens had their way, countries would follow the example of Germany’s Energiewende and relentlessly pursue the deployment of renewables, regardless of the (considerable) cost. But leaving aside the higher power bills such a policy inevitably brings about, it can also undermine the stability of the grid delivering that power. Wind and solar producers can only contribute intermittently, which is a tough quality to square with the most important demand of any power grid: consistency. There’s a real, tangible danger in being snookered by the policy advice of shallow-thinking greens.

3) Charles Moore: Obsession With Global Warming Will Put The Lights Out All over Britain
The Daily Telegraph, 8 November 2015

We are destroying our sources of secure energy as windless Wednesday showed this week

I spent much of Wednesday in fields in southern England. It was very warm for the time of year. I noticed there was almost no wind. Usually, even on calm days, one can see the autumn leaves trembling slightly on the branch, but there the stillness was absolute.

The following morning, it was reported – though not as widely as it should have been – that, for the first time, the National Grid had been so worried by a possible shortage of power when people got home from work on Wednesday that it had appealed to industry to reduce power consumption. Energy markets went wild. At one point, the Financial Times said, the grid was paying Severn Power £2,500 per megawatt hour: the usual going rate is £60.

The day before the potential outage, I had appeared on the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2 to talk about Lady Thatcher’s clothes. I was preceded by the fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood. She spoke good sense about how our first woman prime minister’s couture should find a home in the V&A ; but she prefaced her remarks by stating that she detested Margaret Thatcher. By encouraging “capitalism”, Dame Vivienne alleged, the Iron Lady had caused climate change.

I had a comparably surreal encounter with the singer Charlotte Church on BBC Question Time a few weeks earlier. Charlotte insisted that the war in Syria was the result of climate change. Every ill is blamed on global warming. No doubt it also causes the obesity epidemic, female genital mutilation and TV licence evasion.

But now we have reached the point when, on a warm day in early November, the country can run short of electricity, it is time to turn the question round. Is the Western policy elites’ obsession with global warming itself a threat to civilised life on the planet?

Commenting on wobbly Wednesday, the distinguished energy expert Professor Dieter Helm said: “We are now sailing very close to the wind.” I am not sure whether he was playing with that metaphor, but he is right. Of electricity generated in Britain in 2014, 19 per cent came from renewables, the majority of that being wind. So if there ain’t no wind, there’s much less power. And without wind, there has to be a non-intermittent “despatchable” source of energy, such as gas or dirty energy from emergency diesel generators, to plug the gap. And if you have to buy emergency energy, you – or rather we, the consumers – have to pay emergency prices.

The problems of emergency are only the most visible tip of it. Because, for green, EU-driven reasons, the Government hastens the closure of coal-fired power stations (still 30 per cent of our electricity generation) and prevents the construction of new ones, it needs other sorts of power stations. But when it held its “capacity auction” last December, no new gas-fired power stations resulted. The potentially interested companies feared the political risk which now infects the subject and the knowledge that, if green policies continue, the demand for non-green power will sink lower.

So now we have coal-fired power stations closing down, no new gas-fired power stations coming on stream and – even after the friendly words exchanged between David Cameron and the President of China in London last month – no actual, definite money to ensure we get the promised nuclear power station at Hinkley Point. The energy “safety cushion” has lost its stuffing. All we know is that the current renewables subsidies of £4 billion will rise to £8.5 billion by 2020: we’ll be getting lots more offshore wind-farms (there being fewer angry voters in the sea than on land).

On Thursday, I attended the glittering ceremony at the Savoy Hotel in which Mr Cameron was made Parliamentarian of the Year by The Spectator. In his acceptance speech, he emphasised that “security” was one of the chief concerns of his second term. He was speaking about defence and terrorism, but what about the security of our energy supply? The former is menaced by actual enemies; the danger to the latter is entirely self-inflicted. If successive governments had not, in the name of saving the planet, set about destroying the reasonably well-functioning post-privatisation market, we would not now be in danger of plunging ourselves into darkness.

A few weeks ago, the Financial Times reported an authoritative calculation that, in 2016-17, Britain will need a capacity of 56 gigawatts, but will actually have only 53 gigawatts. Just as we are reducing our financial deficit, we are creating an energy one. Just as the supply of fossil fuels such as oil and shale gas vastly increases (thus reducing the cost), so ever-higher electricity costs caused by renewables subsidy are wiping out our steel industry.

Obviously we must not forget that there are only 30 days left to save the world. In early December, in Paris, “COP 21”, the latest UN climate conference, will take place. Religious authorities like the Pope, the Dalai Lama and Roger Harrabin of the BBC all insist that global agreement on emissions reduction must be reached there if catastrophe is to be averted. Indeed there can be little doubt that a document will be signed. But a couple of qualifications should be borne in mind.

The first is that it is quietly admitted that there will be no legally binding agreement. The developing countries will not submit themselves, by law, to the hairshirt which Western powers love wearing. They will promise to cut emissions, and we know that they won’t. We shall promise to pay them $100 billion a year to assist greener energy, and they know that we won’t. The objective, rather than the rhetorical effect, will therefore be to make the idea of legally binding targets die. If the EU, including Britain, tries to persist with them alone, we shall turn our continent into a retirement home and leave the rest of world history to others.

The second qualification is disclosed in another news story this week. The New York Times revealed that China has been burning 17 per cent more coal per year than it previously thought. Since the whole edifice of global climate change reduction depends on what the Bali conference of 2007 called “measurable, reportable, verifiable” figures for emissions, the fact that a quantity larger than the entire annual fossil fuel consumption of Germany could previously have been missed suggests that the figures are nearly meaningless.

4) Matt Ridley: It’s Time For A U-Turn On Green Energy
The Times, 9 November 2015

So-called cleaner energy has in reality created a dirtier, costlier and less reliable electricity industry. The government must make a U-turn or get the blame itself.

Suppose that a government policy had caused shortages of bread, so the price of a loaf had shot up and was spiking even higher on certain days. Suppose that the high price of bread was causing massive job losses. Suppose that the policy was justified on the grounds that the bread was now coming from farmers whose practices were better for the environment, but it turned out they were probably worse for the environment instead. There would be a rethink, right?

For bread, read electricity. The government needs to rethink its electricity policy. Last week’s emergency was a harbinger of worse to come: because the wind was not blowing on a mild autumn day, the National Grid had to call for some large electricity consumers to switch off, and in addition offered to pay up to £2,500 a megawatt-hour — 40 times the normal price — for generators capable of stepping into the breach at short notice.

Among other lessons, this teaches us that letting Liberal Democrats run the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) for five years was an expensive mistake. What puzzles me is how little the current government seems to realise it must make a U-turn or get the blame itself.

The coalition promised secure, affordable and low-carbon power, but instead gave us unreliable, expensive and high-carbon power. What is worse, this outcome was “wholly predictable but wholly unanticipated by policymakers”, in the words of Rupert Darwall of the Centre for Policy Studies, speaking to a House of Lords committee (on which I sit) earlier this year.

Mr Darwall’s argument is that wind farms, which cost a lot to build and maintain but pay nothing for fuel, can sell electricity for very low prices when the wind’s blowing. Being intermittent, this power therefore destroys incentives to invest in highly efficient “combined-cycle” gas turbines (CCGTs).

If, when the wind blows, a new gas plant has to switch off, then the return on investment in gas is negative. Combined-cycle plants are sophisticated machines and don’t like being switched on and off. Therefore the gradual replacement of coal-fired power by much more efficient gas-fired power has stalled as a direct result of the wind-power boom.

To solve this problem, the government came up with a “capacity mechanism”, a fancy name for subsidising fossil fuels. But this further impost on the hard-pressed bill payers (likely to exceed £1.3 billion by 2020), instead of bringing forward new gas turbines, last year went mostly to keep old coal-fired stations going. The next auction, due in December, has brought a rash of bids from diesel generators. This is madness: wind power has made the country more reliant on dirty, high-carbon coal and diesel. (I declare my usual interest in coal, but note that coal has probably benefited from the policy I am criticising.)

Meanwhile, the old coal stations that have not attracted a subsidy are closing because of the coalition’s unilateral carbon tax (sorry, “floor price”). Eggborough, for instance, tried to switch to subsidised biomass, better known as wood — a fuel that emits even more carbon dioxide than coal per unit of energy — but was refused and so is closing. Thus, when the wind drops, we are plunged into crisis.

Wind’s advocates have long argued that cables to Europe would help on windless days because we could suck in power from Germany when the wind’s blowing there but not here. Yet last week, as we were debating this very issue in the Lords, I checked and wind was generating about 1 per cent of our electricity, and even less of Germany’s. Studies by the Renewable Energy Foundation published as long ago as 2008 have shown that wind speeds are well correlated across Europe most of the time. Was anyone listening?

Prices charged to electricity consumers have been rising because of the high cost of subsidies for wind power, especially offshore wind. The DECC’s numbers show that small businesses will be paying 77 per cent more per unit for electricity by 2020 than they would be if we were not subsidising renewables. The cost of the subsidies is on track to hit roughly £10 billion a year in 2020 and that’s before paying for the fleet of diesel generators being subsidised under the capacity mechanism and extra grid infrastructure costs. What are we getting for that money? A less reliable electricity system, a big increase in cost, lost jobs in the aluminium and steel industries and no discernible cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.

If that last claim seems far-fetched, consider the following calculation. According to the wind industry, a 2-megawatt onshore wind turbine could cut emissions by about 1,800 tonnes a year in average conditions, offshore a bit more. With about 13 gigawatts of wind now in service, that would mean the total wind fleet can displace at most 15 million tonnes, or 2 per cent of our 700 million tonnes of total annual emissions.

But, since the effect of the wind boom (solar production, by the way, is an irrelevance lost in the decimal points) has been to deter new gas and prolong the life of inefficient coal, and since it wastes power to get a fossil-fuelled power station up to speed when the wind drops, and since expensive wind power has driven energy-intensive industries abroad to more carbon-intensive countries, the actual emissions savings achieved by wind are lower and probably negative. We would have been far better off buying new gas or “clean-coal” capacity instead: replacing coal with gas more than halves emissions.

After Wednesday’s near emergency, ministers must surely realise that we cannot rely on the weather to produce the right amount of electricity, and gas is far cheaper and more environmentally friendly than the DECC’s dirty diesel solution. As for nuclear power, Hinkley C was supposed to help with the supply crunch, but it will only come on stream in the mid-2020s, and at a gigantic cost.

Full post

5) Peter Hitchens: Warmists Armed With Windmills Are The Real Threat To Britain
Mail on Sunday, 8 November 2015

As we squeak and gibber about the distant danger of terrorism, this country stands on the brink of a real threat to its economy, its daily life and its order.

It is a threat we have brought on ourselves by embracing an obsessive, pseudo-scientific dogma, a dogma that is also destroying irreplaceable industries and jobs week by week.

Last week we came within inches of major power blackouts, though official spokesmen claim unconvincingly that all was well.

Experts on the grid have for some time predicted a crisis of this sort, but had not expected it anything like so soon, or in such warm weather conditions. It is the fact that they were taken by surprise that warns us there may be worse to come.

Though Wednesday was mild for the time of year, the National Grid had to resort to emergency measures to keep Britain’s lights on. These included paying industries to reduce their power consumption and giving electricity generators up to 50 times the normal wholesale price to produce additional supplies – plainly emergency measures.

Forests of hideous, useless, vastly subsidised windmills predictably failed to help – because there was no wind. Acres of hideous, useless, vastly subsidised solar panels predictably failed to help, because it was dark.

Several perfectly good coal-fired power stations failed to help because we recently shut them down and blew them up. We did this in obedience to European Union regulations that prevent Britain from generating power from coal.

Meanwhile, China builds a new coal-fired power station every few weeks and fills the atmosphere with soot and carbon dioxide. If man-made CO2 really does cause global warming, then this policy of destroying Britain’s coal-fired power stations is not affecting that.

Even on its own terms, the action is mad.

Craziest fact of all: if things get really desperate, the Grid will resort to banks of back-up diesel generators, perhaps the least green form of energy there is. And if they can’t cope, a country almost wholly dependent on electrically powered computers will go dark and silent, as our competitors laugh.

You will not be comforted to know that two more perfectly good coal-fired British power stations are already doomed by Euro-decree. They will be shut and irrevocably destroyed in the next six months.

And our last deep coal mine, at Kellingley, sitting on a huge reserve of high-quality coal, is to be shut for ever.

The UK’s exceptionally high electricity prices, forced up by green taxes to pay for useless windmills and solar panels, are destroying manufacturing industry. Having closed much of what remains of our steel industry, high power charges last week claimed their latest victim, the Michelin tyre plant in Ballymena, Northern Ireland.

As I have pointed out here in the past, the world has seen this sort of madness before, when dogma has been allowed to veto common sense.

This is what happened to the Soviet Union, which destroyed its economy and its society by trying to create Utopia. As usual, the result was hell.

The inflexible, intolerant cause of Warmism is not as bad as Leninism. There is no Gulag, only a lot of self-righteous spite for any who dare to dissent. And who cannot sympathise with those who genuinely think they are saving the planet? But they aren’t.

Do they really think, once the free Western countries sink into decay thanks to their policies, that a mighty China will pay any attention to their cries of protest?

They are just hustling us into the Third World, while saving nothing at all.