Factories face switch-off to keep household lights on, National Grid warns – Telegraph
Factories may have to shut down on weekday evenings this winter to keep household lights on as Britain faces the worst power crunch in a decade, National Grid has warned.
There is an “increased likelihood” that there will be “insufficient supply available in the market to meet demand”, forcing the UK to rely on “last resort” measures such as paying factories to power down, National Grid warned.
The risk of blackouts will be the highest since 2007/08, even once emergency plans to reduce energy demand from businesses and fire up old mothballed plant have been deployed, analysis released on Thursday shows.
Britain’s spare capacity margin – the effective ‘safety buffer’ between peak electricity demand and available power supplies – will be just 5.1 per cent once the emergency measures are used.
Without such intervention to artificially bolster supplies, the margin would have fallen to just 1.2 per cent, the lowest in a decade National Grid confirmed.
My view has not changed, capacity will be tight, but should be enough. The real problems will start in two or three years time, once a few more coal and gas plants have shut.
As the Telegraph reports, the govt’s capacity market auction for 2018 is a waste of space because it is nearly all based on existing plant.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
And pity those Purchasing Managers instructed by their Financial Directors to hire diesel gen-sets.
And how many factories will lay off employees as a result? This stuff will end when the general public is inconvenienced. Here, the folks in CA don’t give the proverbial rat’s posterior about all of the out-of-work miners in WV and the economic consequences throughout the whole State. BUT when their little plug-in cars cannot be recharged, it will hit the fan.
Well; I am just installing a generator in my garage. I had one in an outbuilding at my last address (a rural cottage in Scotland). I found my last generator very useful as power outages were very common. Now that I live closer to town (but still in the country), I find that I am experiencing as may power outages as I did right out in the sticks. I just feel sorry for the majority of people who probably don’t have space or money/know how to have a generator.
Don’t know about England and Scotland, but in the US, power outages that last for days always include at least one death from running a generator inside a building. Generators are great if they come on automatically and are wired in, but most people cannot afford such a set-up.
What happens when the population has become so helpless they cannot function without electricity and the lights go out? Sadly, it looks like England will find out soon. Too bad no one thought to prevent such a tragedy. I thought saving the earth was so future generations would have a better life. Now it seems the idea is to eliminate future generations.
That’ll do wonders for our industrial productivity.
I don’t suppose the companies that lose out over this will be recompensed out of the excessive subsidies paid to the ‘unreliables’ trough-snouters like Yeo…
No they won’t, but they will be “recompensed” by the Tax Payers, so we get hit four times.
Once for the Buying of Land for Wind Farms, once for assisting of the building of the Wind Farms, once for the Subsidies to the Wind Farm Generation and now for ther CHAOS that that policy has caused.
Inmates running the Asylum.
Unintended consequences strike again. It’s already been noted but I’ll say it again…. until the people are personally affected nothing will change.
Today, people are sheep, they will take it again and again and continue to tighten the belt. Some will build enough courage to complain, but very silently else someone would hear them and think ill of them. Some might even resort to write to a someone, but never be very aggressive. The sheepeople are continue to be in control and continue to elect the same people who have been and are responsible for their misery!
Thanks, Paul, but this is very bad news for Britain. It will loose jobs, out of which people live. The alarmists will not stop hurting people to “save the Earth”. They fervently believe without evidence, that a very small increase in atmospheric CO2 will cause a catastrophic change in Earth’s climate. If this is so, why global warming stopped after the 1998 El Niño?
Answer: Because CO2 does not control lower tropospheric temperatures on Earth, this only happens in the IPCC models, and that’s why they failed.
We’ll see what happens around spring 2016 when El Niño starts to wane (according to NOAA-NWS Climate Prediction Center – CPC).
You can add this one from the Tele today:
1,000 job losses expected at Tata Steel as industry holds crisis summit
My emphasis. This is all on the back of that mad announcement yesterday that having made fossil fuel power plants uneconomic Cameron & co will fine the energy companies if they don’t build any.
Surely they must know they are destroying their own economy with this stupid stuff.
“Atlas Shrugged” arrives. You must build a plant even if you have no money and cannot afford to do so, even if you cannot make money off the plant. You must build even if you cannot.
It’s not at all obvious that these people know anything except how to con people into voting them into power.
Steel and aluminium are both strategic industries, essential to any sort of re-armament.
Cameron is playing silly buggers with Putin, who I’m certain is well aware of the fact we haven’t either any more.
Truly awesome!
The sheer hypocrisy of the M.P.s who commiserate with the coal miners and the steelworkers as they lose their jobs is sickening to behold.
When the big Green lie is exposed for what it is,and the people realise that their M.P.s voted to destroy their industries and livlihoods by passing the evil Climate Change Act,the poitical upheaval will be wondrous to behold.
Will comrades Cameron and Milliband even care.
Maybe they can use these for backup
http://renews.biz/100064/thrybergh-hydro-sets-yorkshire-record/
Wow that must be as powerful as DRAX B
It cost HOW MUCH?
Are they efficient though compared to a waterwheel?
“To keep the lights on, we have to turn some lights off”
Wonderful.
Just like “To save the village we had to destroy it”
I think you understand this perfectly, Andrew!