Lights Out?

[Dave Liquorice]

Looking at Gridwatch we didn't half lean on the gas to meet the peak demand this evening.

Off the scale for the graph at about 22GW, coal looks to have been flat out since midday at maybe 14 GW. Hydro nearly a GW all day, normal would 0.5 GW, pumped nearly 2 GW for the peak, Nuke is still down at 4.5 GW, 3 GW from the continent, 1 GW biomass, wind 1GW.

And we didn't even break 50 GW of demand...

I wonder how much the Supplemental Balancing Reserve (SBR) contracts announced yesterday costing?

"Supplemental Balancing Reserve (SBR) is targeted at contracting for reserves from generating plant that would otherwise be closed or mothballed."

/

Reading between the lines they are crapping themselves particularly as HMG has said "the lights will not go out". Note the first document only mentions 380 MW of DSBR for this winter, they have just signed up Peterhead for 780 MW of SBR...

[Tim Watts]

Well spotted - and it's not even "cold" yet.

I shall be watching today with interest....

[polygonum]

I'd have a lot more time to listen to politician's "won't go out" remarks if they put something in place that meant they suffer if they are wrong. (More than losing the next election.)

There appears to be some sort of assumption that our remaining generating capacity is somehow less likely to burst into flames, leak, or whatever else could befall a power station. A bit like assuming that because you have rolled a few sizes, the next roll definitely won't be a six...

[Andy Burns]

With pumped hydro giving a good thump too, and the french+dutch connectors importing all they can ...

Where is TNP anyway?

[Chris Hogg]

The trouble is, in HMG's efforts to 'keep the lights on', industries that use a lot of electricity will be expected to cut back, so production will suffer, and we'll be back in recession before you know it.

[Jethro_uk]

Unless they are *already* doing it ? With the price of energy being what it is, I would be amazed if some firms hadn't investigated the economics of reducing the power to their freezers/chillers by a factor.

[Tim Streater]

R & S, I'm guessing.

[Dave Liquorice]

still

Quite, I just happened to have a look, and went wow at the gas then WOW at the pumped.

I think the Grid is getting rather nervous that the nukes aren't going to be back, that 4GW (ish) would make all the difference. Presumably lack of the nukes is why they are bringing in SBR a year early. I wonder what assumptions on capacity have been made for the quoted 4.1% margin (2.25 GW for a 55 GW demand).

[Brian Gaff]

I do think though that the most likely problems are still severe weather related in sofar that if the grid is damaged or major resources are isolated due to weather. We see this on quite a few occasions.

You can only do so much to prepare for peak demand, the weather is always the master. Brian

[Martin Brown]

But the weather isn't particularly bad at the moment and they have pegged a couple of his meters past the end stop already. I'd say it was better than evens that they have to drop chunks of heavy use business off grid this winter given that a slightly cooler day in a mild spell in one of the hottest Autumns ever can push CCGT past 20GW.

It wouldn't take much to trigger accidental grid dropouts with the margins already so tight this early into the winter season.

What is the maximum peak capacity of the various interconnects?

Pray that it is windy in the next cold snap!

[John Williamson]

Don't forget, Didcot has just lost part of its capacity for an indefinite period, as has Ferrybridge, so we're a gigawatt down just with those two missing.

If they hadn't been so keen to demolish Dodcot A, it could have been fired up as a stopgap and hang the EU rules for now

[Andrew Gabriel]

Was listening to one of the UK managers of a hotel chain on the radio (can't recall which one - might have been the Marriot). They've modified thirty-something of their hotels to turn off the aircon for an hour when the grid is straining. There's sufficient inertia in their buildings for that not to be very noticable.

If there was a networked API I could access to indicate how deep in the shit we are, I could integrate it into my home automation. For example, if we know that we'll be in the shit around 5pm, I could lower the temperature of my freezer a couple of hours before, and raise it during the overload, so that the compressor won't cut in during that period.

[Andrew Gabriel]

One of the papers is predicting 80MPH on Sunday/Monday.

[Huge]

According to an item on the Beeb news the other night, they are.

[cl]

I worked for a small company back in the 1970s (1977 to 1980 to be exact) that developed microprocessor based systems for doing something a bit like this.

It wasn't predictive but tried to minimise a business' maximum demand but turning off a few things for a while when there was a peak. I wrote the software (8080 and Z80). Most systems just displayed what was happening but we did actually directly turn things off in some places, the ones I can remember were Pilkington Glass annealing ovens and electric arc furnaces at British Rail - quite fun that last one!

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

They've been switching our street lights off at night (01:00 hrs) for a few years now.

[Jethro_uk]

In that case we're f***ed.

Vaguely reminds me of a joke ...

The Indian Chief thought that it was going to be a bad winter so he sent all the braves out to collect wood. As he watched them return laden with timber from the forest he suddenly felt that he ought to check his forecast so he phoned the local met office.

"Tell me, is it going to be a bad winter?"

"Yes" said the forecaster " it will be a bad one"

So the Chief told the braves that they didn't have enough wood and sent them back into the forest again. They returned with more wood but once again the Chief had doubts and he called the forecaster to confirm.

"It is going to be a really severe winter" replied the forecaster.

The Chief look at the wood store, decided that more was required and the braves were dispatched back in to forest. The Chief called the forecaster.

"Are you sure it's going to be a really severe winter"

"Look" said the forecaster "its definitely going to be the worst winter on record - the Indians are gathering wood like crazy!""

[Tim Watts]

There's very simple way - look at the system frequency. If it's getting low (near the lower bound) the system *is* straining.

I'm not sure where TNP's site pulls it from but I assume it is available somewhere via an API???

[Tim Watts]

In a perverse way, I'll be glad if we do have a few emergency demand-control load shedding involving lights going out.

Because that will finally remove ALL doubt in the minds of the damn fool politicians and public that we need a full scale nuke building programme starting yesterday.

Sadly, we've had a number of close calls and the writing's been on the wall over this for quite a time, but the politicians don't think long term, the general public by and large are too ignorant[1] to care and the only people make a lot of noise are the anti-nuke green lobby.

[1] And I don't mean "retarded" I mean most people I know are simply not informed about such things, even though anyone watching TNP's Gridwatch could work it out for themselves. Whether it's due to laziness or lack of media coverage, I don't know.

I'm just sorry that lots of people are going to suffer if they don't have contingency like at least a gas fire or open fireplace.

[Chris Hogg]

The Sun is predicting a big freeze this winter