Christine Neil, Ringford, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland emailed: It's not really the snow that bothers me its lack of power. No home phone, no internet, no heating, no hot water and with it being really windy and living in an old house it's a wee tad draughty! ...
Welcome to the future. Shame that even though it's "really windy" your lights aren't on.
Any why has the home phone stopped? Lines down or only cordless instruments? And why no backup for heat/light/cooking? Useless silly moo.
Brought in three more crates of logs this morning before they get covered in snow, now have about 5 days of logs inside as well as quite a bit of softwood from half a dozen old pallets and other scrap wood that might last another day or two.
One other thing, if you have a home phone you really do need to have a basic phone you can plug in, as otherwise even though the line may still work you phone won't. Brian
On Friday 22 March 2013 16:38 RayL12 wrote in uk.d-i-y:
There might be another penny dropping soon if the report that we are down to
1.5 days of stored gas are true.
Speculation that it might affect some industrial customers including gas fired power stations (you can cut off the electricity but you cannot cut off domestic gas, at least not without a bugger of a make good operation afterwards)...
No need for speculation, some gas fired stations are on interruptible gas contracts. Luckily Friday and the weekend came with their lower demand, and the imports of gas from Belgium are slowly returning otherwise the shit might have already hit a stationary fan.
Saturday is showing 44917MW declared generation with 46375MW predicted demand at around 7pm. That is with short term 'accurate' wind predictions
But the worst is yet to come. At 00:15 Saturday indicative surplus generation including renewables is
Monday 25th March 6411MW Tuesday 26th March 6230 MW
They both drop into the crisis level category.
Even with the contribution from wind it looks like a System Warning could be issued in the very near future. Some people at National Grid System Control will be, quite rightly, shittiing themselves right now.
It's taken nearly 23 Years but Thatchers Privatisation Legacy is now here.
At 0100 today (Sat) we were burning 3.66GW of gas and the French and Dutch interconnects were at 1.5GW and 1GW respectively. Wind was still peaked at 5.2GW.
Can't help wondering what would happen if the wind dropped just as the country wakes up and puts the kettle on en masse later this morning.
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"British wholesale gas prices hit a record high on Friday after the failure of a vital import pipeline demonstrated the vulnerability of the nation's energy supply to external shocks."
Now why on earth didn't Labour actually do something about that in the last 23 years?
"The legacy of the Norman Conquest is, 1000 years later, coming home to roost"
I blame it all on the Romans meself.
However leaving senseless stupid political polemic aside, we are actually in decent shape right now. Coal and nuclear are all pretty much flat out, and for once there is decent wind with a broad swathe of high winds across the country.
"But britains coal and nuclear power stations are unaffected: It should be noted that all the wind power is subject to similar import issues when the Atlantic fails to deliver wind when ordered to by the Green Party."
This is the problem with the current parliamentary model where there's a government and an opposition. It means too many good ideas which could be enacted with cross-party co-operation get buried.
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