Cold and Still

[Dave Liquorice]

Nice cold and still day out there, a mere 4" of snow outside with snow showers passing through overnight temp about -5 C currently nearly 2 C, no wind to speak of.

And the point is? Demand 48.09 GW at 1250. Coal flatout at 15.74 GW Nukes also flat out at 8.61 GW, CCGT 19.32 GW (about 5 GW still available?), Wind 0.22 GW (ie SFA), France 1.5 GW (reluctant to sell or is the interconnect slighly broken?). Wonder what we will lean on for this evenings peak demand? What do you guesstimate it will be?

[Tim Streater]

So wind is producing .22GW out of the 7 or more that we have paid for. I'm still waiting for harry to tell us where we apply for a refund.

[harryagain]

Good day for PV here. Cold, bright sunshine.

[Andy Burns]

Short.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Yes - todays's load has been the same as the late afternoon peaks for the last several weeks, and we're only just starting to ramp up for today's late afternoon peak. Could be interesting unless the peak is relatively flatter than normal.

[philipuk]

Demand peaks in the interval between it getting dark and the end of office hours. Solar panels don't work in the dark.

[Andy Burns]

They've tickled an OCGT (only 140MW) into service ...

[philipuk]

We are still managing to export to Ireland. In a crunch there is quite a bit of pumped storage around to cover the peak.

What would be more interesting is if we were a large power station or interconnect down. There still some spare capacity, not much, but some.

Philip

[Dave Liquorice]

And now dark when we need it...

[Andrew Gabriel]

Pumped peaked at around 2GW at 1630 - don't know if that's because some of it is running out since then, as demand is still increasing.

[Tim Streater]

And when we need it, wind cannot do the job reliably or indeed at all:

RENEWABLE ENERGY ***FAIL***

[Andy Burns]

They've ramped pumped back up again since then, also non-pumped hydro jumped up when the pumped did, looks like were at or close to today's peak, is the SBR included on the gridwatch graphs, or "hidden"?

[Tim Watts]

We all knew that.

Hope a few MPs' houses go dark just to ram the point home...

[Tim Watts]

As they say, it's not over until the DCI** comes...

** Demand Control Imminent.

They'll be here if that happens:

(Note may not work in some browsers - FF OK, Chrome no.

[Dave Liquorice]

No there isn't we have 4 pumped storage schemes:

Absolute Max runtime GW GWHr Runtime Hrs Ffestiniog 0.36 1.3 3.6 Cruachan 0.40 10 25 Foyers 0.30 6.3 21 Dinorwig 1.80 9.1 5 ======= 2.86 GW

Pumped hit 2+ GW today with hydro at a GW, that is pretty much flat out on both only rarely does pumped go much above 2 GW.

Yes, there is a GW or so of SBR but we have OCGT still running at

140 MW and the nukes are doing well at 8 GW plus, they are normally around 6 to 7 GW. Hinkly B Reactor 4 goes offline soon, Heysham 2 reactor 7 goes offline in Feb, there goes a GW...

The frequency didn't dip very much, so I supect the actual peak demand wasn't quite as high as forecast. I saw 53.44 GW, which although high is nothing special. 55 GW in Feb when Hinkly B/4 and Heysham 2/7 are off line for statutory inspection would be far more "interesting".

[Andy Burns]

Well, there weren't any system warnings etc today, so I don't think they really came that close. Energy by source for the past 24h

coal 35.67% ccgt 32.43% nuclear 21.13% interconnects 4.29% wind 3.29% hydro 1.46% pumped 1.05% other 0.66% ocgt 0.02%

[Andy Burns]

I did wonder if they shed 3-4GW of demand at about 10am?

[Andy Burns]

The total delivered by pumped was 10.46 GWh in the last 24hours, out of their maximum 26.7GWh

[CB]

I notice solar is not on that (or is it included in "other") - do we have any idea at all what sort of output all the solar might be producing?

[Andy Burns]

It's just a sum over the day of the gridwatch power numbers, I dunno if TNP has mentioned which slot the PV goes into? Apparently some of the wind is counted differently too.