Anyone got a spare 330 megawatts of power this winter?

[Andrew Gabriel]

Might want to make test out your lighting/heating back-up provision before the winter...

[Martin Brown]

They will plan to keep household lights on this winter... but don't expect to be able to cook or keep warm!

[Tim+]

And how will they do that? (reserve power for lighting that is).

Tim

[Chris Hogg]

Oui!

[Dave Liquorice]

provision

I guess the OP doesn't have any backup cooking (or matches for gas) facilties or back up heating if there is no mains to run the CH.

Is anyone else have trouble parseing the final sentance?

"National Grid is looking to save up to 330 megawatts (MW) of power demand capacity this winter."

s/capacity // makes it work.

And 330 MW isn't a lot, about 0.6% of a 55 GW peak demand, which is ball park for winter. How much can they "save" by dropping the voltage/frequency rather more than they normally let it vary?

Also interesting that National Grid have had to be given new balancing tools. Is some one up top getting a bit nervous about the statments made about the lights staying on this winter will come back to haunt them?

[Brian Gaff]

Well since one of their energy schemes has fitted this house with storage heaters a few years ago, they had better keep the energy flowing or they will have a lot of disgruntled and cold customers of the electricity companies selling the stuff.

Maybe this is the time to bring back the treadmill into prisons? Brian

[Bill Wright]

No mention in this biased BBC report that the problem has been caused entirely by the environmental movement.

Bill

[Martin Brown]

No it hasn't. It has been caused entirely by successive governments prevaricating about building new electricity plant for decades.

You can find energy experts like Prof Sir Ian Fell (and others) giving them warnings about this impending shortage over the past decade and most recently in 2013 he even predicted the year of likely crunch time would be winter 2015.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Another issue which came up a month or so back was that Eon discovered the graphite cores in its reactors have been running out faster than predicted, which brings forward significantly the end-date for those reactors (although still way beyond their original design lives). They've applied for a license amendment to allow them to continue operating them with less graphite core than originally designed. If they don't get that, there will be a giant energy gap, and a horribly poluting one at that.

[Dave Liquorice]

Under pressure from the "green" lobby and with politicians these days being career politicians, not having the scientific/engineering understanding to take heed of the warnings coming from industry. Throw in a handful of short termisum "Will it happen in this parliment?" "No". Well not my problem then, the next lot can look at it.

[Huge]

Which itself has been caused, in part, by the environmentalists. And NIMBYs.

[charles]

But, since the electricity supply industry was privatised by MT, it has nothing to do with the government.

[whisky-dave]

That may well be true but then how to we get someone to build more power stations of any kind id the government won't allow companies to charge what they want. Difficult problem.

[Andrew May]

I thought that they could charge what they want. The sticking point seems to be that the companies want the government to guarantee them a certain price into the future.

[The Natural Philosopher]

ROFLMAO!!

the electricity supply has been renationalised by stealth. It's very simple. You now generate subsidies. Not electricity. All paid for by non-taxes added to your electricity bill.

This allows idiots to claim its not nationalised, and therefore blame capitalism when in fact its totally nationalised. And ALL the fault of Ed Miliband and the Blair/Brown cockup.

[whisky-dave]

Theere seems to be pressure on them to lower prices.

Like any copmpany thinking of investing they want to make sure that the can make a profit, I can't blame them for that.

[Andrew May]

Me neither. I was merely pointing out the fallacy of "the government won't allow companies to charge what they want. "

[Tim Watts]

I'd support smart meters (with remote cutoff) if everyone who objected to a new power station was automatically volunteered for load shedding!

[Tim Watts]

Not true - it is heavily regulated and also the electricity co's cannot just what up a new nuke without much form filling...

[Huge]