National Grid spends £4bn to prevent blackouts after surge in wind and solar
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
National Grid was forced to spend more than £4bn to keep the lights on during 2022 following a surge in power prices and a jump in intermittent wind and solar power.
The company spent a record £4.2bn on balancing payments – taking actions such as importing power from abroad, ramping up gas stations, or turning off wind turbines, to make sure supply always matches demand.
The so-called “balancing costs” are ultimately added to consumers’ bills, on top of high energy costs which are fuelling a cost–of-living crisis.
The Nuclear Industry Association, which calculated the figures using data published by National Grid’s electricity system operator (ESO), said it was the first time annual balancing costs had shot past £4bn.
It argues the figures show the need for more stable sources of power, such as nuclear power stations.
Tom Greatrex, chief executive of the NIA, said: “We urgently need to get going with a pipeline of large-scale stations and a fleet of small-modular reactors to provide stable, predictable, clean power alongside renewables.
“If we don’t act urgently with a clear policy framework, other countries will leapfrog us in attracting investors who want to develop in Britain, and we risk not delivering on energy security and net zero.”
Electricity supply and demand must be constantly matched to avoid triggering blackouts.
National Grid ESO intervenes in the market throughout the day to smooth out any mismatches between supply and demand, and make sure there is always a healthy buffer of supplies.
It can, for example, pay power stations to quickly ramp up if there is a looming shortfall, or it can buy in power via undersea cables from France, Belgium or other neighbours.
It can also pay wind farms to switch off if it is too windy and turbines risk overwhelming the grid. This often happens because cables are not large enough to move the electricity from windy areas to where it is needed.
The ESO’s task in balancing the market is getting more complicated with more wind and solar power on the system, as the supplies are intermittent and not completely predictable.
Wind power supplied more than a quarter of Britain’s electricity last year for the first time.
Meanwhile Britain’s ageing nuclear stations, which provide a steady flow of power once on, have been closing down because of their age, with replacements yet to be built.
The high bill for balancing the system in 2022 has also been driven by exceptionally high electricity costs over the past year.
These were largely a knock-on effect of high gas costs which started climbing in 2021 due to shortages as countries re-opened from the pandemic, worsened by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Gas is used to generate more than a third of Britain’s electricity, meaning the price of electricity generated in gas-fired power plants affects the price of electricity from all sources.
Meanwhile, generators being paid by the ESO to balance the system have been able to charge high prices for their electricity, as they knew the supplies were tight.
At one point in July, the ESO had to pay almost £10,000 per MWh to import power from Belgium amid constraints on the network in the south-east.
According to the figures calculated by the NIA, balancing electricity supplies has cost £9.83bn in the four years between 2019 and 2022.
The figures are highlighted amid concerns that clean energy and other investors are being lured away from the UK by huge subsidies in the US and EU.
£4.2 billion works out at £150 for every household in the country, but you won’t see this itemised on your bill. And inevitably this cost will continue to rise significantly every year we build more wind farms.
And it is no good blaming the price of natural gas either – the National Grid has to pay a high price to ramp up gas power when it is needed for the reason that it is not economic to run CCGTs in such an intermittent fashion.
As the article notes, gas still produces more than a third of our electricity, so what will the National Grid do when CCGTs are shut down, which the Labour Party want to do by 2030?
I must admit, I had to laugh at the final sentence:
The figures are highlighted amid concerns that clean energy and other investors are being lured away from the UK by huge subsidies in the US and EU.
I though renewables were now the cheapest form of electricity, so why would they need any subsidies?
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Pushing for including subsidies on an itemised bill….
Should this appear as standing charge or unit costs?
Another political football to kick into the long grass, like all the costs of Net Zero.
No. Subsidies should appear under the heading of, ‘Political Donations AKA Backhanders’.
C4 Sunday night – Guy Martin’s Power trip looking at power generation. Some interesting observations (and truths!) along with the usual inaccuracies. In one episode he is shown sitting with the person in the National Grid control centre who deals with the balancing as he makes the fine adjustments in real time. …. “eg just brought on line a gas generator – thats just cost £2000”
The program is worth a watch
Guy Martin is always worth a watch and I haven’t seen the first episode yet. My only concern is that the trailer shows a chimney being blown up which I assume is at a perfectly good coal power station that could have helped keep costs down were it not being paid at gas prices.
final demolition of Eggborough (2GW closed 2018). one of the big 4 stations on the Yorkshire coalfield opened in the 1960s..(along with Thorpe Marsh (1GW closed 1994) , Ferrybridge (2GW closed 2016) and Drax (originally 4GW coal) All of them efficient, with scrubbers to reduce pollution, all with direct trains looping from Selby or Kellingley mines all day to supply.
so that was 9GW of baseload. Drax now Biomass (so “green” – ha!). Drax coal units reprieved as are West Burton and Ratcliffe, which along with the now closed High Marnham and Cottam, all sitting on the Notts coalfield also produced another 8GW of baseload
So that was 17GW of efficient baseload electricity gone or going
Tragic……….
At least he exposed the folly of Draxs wood pellets despite a rep from Drax trying to say otherwise. If nothing else it will show the less initiated what really happens to give them leccy.
Yes, he was good at pointing out that if you are bothered about CO2 it is worse to burn wood than coal. The Drax dick tried to claim good CO2 from wood vs bad CO2 from coal. And we know it is just bollocks to say that trees can be replanted to recapture the CO2 when they are burnt.
It wasn’t too bad if you could ignore the narrator reading out the usual climate crisis bollocks. I assume Guy’s place is off the gas grid so his heating source would have to be oil or tanked gas as well as burning wood which I think might come up later on. I note in his measuring of costs to run electric equipment he didn’t go anywhere near his air source heat pump. I doubt his house has cavity walls and people don’t retire to Lincolnshire for the warm weather. In his bio diesel trial there was no comparison given of efficiency but it was sad to see him say the government – ie taxpayers – should subsidise the extra cost of it as only serious virtue-signallers will pay the extra.
Thank you, Jerry. It’s the reason l switched it off. But not before Guy showed off his many bits of heavy engineering/tractors and I started to wonder how he would power them if not by ff.
The problem is that the message of these massive costs is not appreciated by the general public. Politicians and civil servants don’t care or don’t understand the consequences of their policies – or deliberately want to see the country become just another member of the the third world.
‘or deliberately want to see the country become just another member of the the third world’
Which so far seems to be their only successful policy.
“It can also pay wind farms to switch off if it is too windy and turbines risk overwhelming the grid. ”
Which is the crux of this idiocy. Much more sensible to give National Grid control over who it calls on when with a view to guaranteeing grid stability and providing power at reasonable prices.
The idea of paying electricity generating companies not to generate makes little sense as far as the bill payer is concerned especially when he is the one paying for this unique concept!
If you look at our road network it’s obvious that we are already a third world country with them all (literally) falling to bits with no possibility of repair!!!!
Sort of to the point – does anyone know why nuclear reactors are ever refuelled in winter? There are 4 of our 9 reactors being refuelled at the moment, completely shut down. Half of Sizewell B is also due to suffer a statutory outage any minute, if not already shut down. In February!
Since the AGR designs can be refuelled without stopping completely and even Sizewell can run for well over a year between refuelling breaks, this has always seemed bonkers to me. Barring faults, I would have thought they would all be expected to run full tilt from November to April.
I queried this with a commenter on another forum who works in the industry. It’s a bit of semantics: “planned” usually means outages that have been scheduled months, if not years, in advance. However, in the current situation, it also means where they have had to shut down to fix something at relatively short notice but not so urgently that it was “unplanned”. It seems to be like when your car starts to make an ominous noise so you book it in for next week, as opposed to when it just dies.
And the grid costs were only around £200m a decade ago.
Is this news going to make a difference to Scotland’s energy policies ?
Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation is ‘Scotland’s real independence day’” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/02/15/nicola-sturgeons-resignation-scotlands-real-independence-day/
I think it’s more to do with cracks in the graphite in the ageing cores. All nuclear except Sizewell is on its last legs and may have to close ahead of previously announced shutdown dates. Maintenance is trying to stave off the inevitable.
” I think it’s more to do with cracks in the graphite in the ageing cores. All nuclear except Sizewell is on its last legs and may have to close ahead of previously announced shutdown dates. Maintenance is trying to stave off the inevitable.”
My limited understanding is that the operational life of some AGR nuclear power stations can be extended, but it’s not profitable for the operator (EDF) to develop the safety case i.e. some extension of the operational life could happen with some taxpayer’s money
National Grid is spending another fortune on its core transmission network. The annual cost of that charged out to consumers is now just short of another £4bn, and is likely to rise rapidly to fund all the extra pylons and substations they need.
Lower voltage distribution networks are even more costly.
It is but half the problem with constraining off wind is that this daft country has allowed wind generators to be built before there was sufficient transmission capacity to shift the power particularly in Scotland. There should be a ruling that the wind far developer needs to upgrade the transmission system first before consents are received to construct.
National Grid is already telling new unreliable generators that they may have to wait up to 15 years to be connected up to the grid.
Also jot news is the T-1 capacity auction.
https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/t-1-capacity-market-auction-clears-at-60-kw-y-with-first-offshore-wind-contract-and-surging-storage
Not sure that batteries are really going to cut it at current durations. Notable that there are no new guarantees from interconnectors. More paid for power cuts – Demand Side Response. Perhaps they are hoping high prices will curtail demand.
farcical that batteries get capacity market payments as unless they are charged up they can’t offer anything
I’ve been taking a look at battery price arbitrage economics. It’s clear they have an incentive to ensure they are charged up ahead of a peak price/demand period to be able to deliver into it. The problem comes I think when you need to meet a demand for say 45GW, and you have 38GW of properly firm dispatchable capacity from CCGT, nuclear, pumped storage etc. and 8GWh of 1 hour duration batteries. They can meet the peak demand for an hour. But if the demand only drops to 42GW in the next hour you would be 3GW short. Duration matters.
In fact, I see the capacity auction discounted a 1 hour battery to 18.9% of capacity, and storage needed to be 6 hours plus to eran 95.1% credit.
For over 6 hours yesterday the entire German off and on shore wind fleet was generating less than 2GW and at times less than 1GW. The total never got above 5GW all day and Offshore was less than 100MW for a short time.
Germany has 58 GW onshore and 8.1 GW offshore.
Learning the hard way is not a good national trait to have 🤔
Paul,
Could you comment sometime on the currrent figures shown for Environmental Levies by the OBR? Now to be found as Table 2.8 it seems…. Currently showing a much lower number than previously as the CfD figure in the table is now negative at over £3bn. Presumably that forecast is already out of date with the drop in gas prices and generation costs, but even so it would be good to hear what your conclusions are.
And where do the balancing costs set out above appear? An update to the overall costs of the current system should be interesting…
Wind and solar producers are just opportunistic subsidy farmers. Take subsidies away and the whole scam collapses like a pack of cards. Not that ending subsidies is going to happen anytime soon – too much free money to be made. Get your money for nothing and your chicks for free, as the song has it.
Yet another colossal Con inflicted upon us by a week, dithering Parliament, a plague on both of the Houses.
“… not completely predictable ”
🤣
The population won’t realise the problems with the generating network, until it shutsdown. Then they will realise you need electricity to power their computer and router, so they can complain about it on social media.
Most have no idea how the grid works and how it is managed.
Quote:- “As the article notes, gas still produces more than a third of our electricity, so what will the National Grid do when CCGTs are shut down, which the Labour Party want to do by 2030?”
As gas does most of the balancing what will do that if it is shut down?
As Chris says :- “Most have no idea how the grid works and how it is managed.”, and I’m sure that applies to our politicians.
Carbon dioxide doesn’t matter
Paul:
I notice the images from your post
appear to have disappeared. Not sure if you have culled them because of space constraints, or if they have been culled for you, or if some site reorganisation has simply orphaned the links.
Yes, unfortunately due to limited storage on WordPress, I have to delete the oldest images from the library
Fortunately all preserved here
http://web.archive.org/web/20210621233542/https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/ex-hurricane-ophelia/
Worth making sure they continue to provide the backup by ensuring they crawl fully after comments are closed. A number of images/diagrams were lost at Euan Mearns’ site that were hosted at tinypic which went out of business because not all posts got properly backed up at Wayback. Others are preserved there.
£4 billion a year is enough to built 2 non EPR nuclear power stations over 10 years. Could we do this instead?
Yet another journalist, politician etc. that seems to think that nuclear can be used alongside intermittent renewables. This isn’t altogether suprising when one of the main sources of information/quotes is the NIA. Large nuclear plants, and I assume the same will be true of small modular reactors, can run at pretty much full capacity or not at all. Therefore they can’t be ramped up and down to compensate for changes in renewable output. Only gas fired power stations, or hugely expensive batteries, can be switched on and off in a short period of time.
That used to be the case but the designs have improved significantly. The French have been at the forefront on this, naturally. Their modern PWRs can ramp up and down quite quickly: close to combined cycle gas plants, I’ve read, although not as fast as gas “peakers”.