Gas deficit today

All the shiny new electrified trains in Scotland aren't running; that would have help a bit if they hadn't been not running anyway because of delayed delivery.

Owain

Yes, I learned that at Sun Microsystems. When I started (back in ISDN days before ADSL), first thing my manager did was push me to get a company ISDN line installed at home. I had temporarily moved to my parents' place whilst looking to move somewhere nearer, so I sort of delayed as I only expected to be there a month or two. No, they pushed, didn't care about the 12 month min contract being wasted, etc.

Well, when I settled in, I realised why. The productivity you get from a home worker, in this sector at least, is way higher. At that time, the push was just in a few departments, but it became company policy, and Sun saved millions by closing out office space. Sun had to get home working right anyway - a comment Bill Joy had made (one of the founders) was that if you want the best people in the world working for you, most of them won't be anywhere near one of your offices, so you have to get home working working well, or you prevent most of the best people in the world from working for you.

A couple of jobs later, I took what I had learned there and applied it to my team in a financial institution which had never considered remote working before. It worked very well, and enabled me to get and retain staff I would not have been able to do with office-only based work.

I am aware of some companies pulling it back in. In those cases, the companies are trying to shrink workforce, and it's used as a way to get rid of workers without having to lay them off - insist they come in to an office every day, when the nearest one is hundreds of miles away, or not even in same country. Oracle and IBM have both done this in recent years.

So around £63 / MWh ?

Yes of course. We can make all the widgets we need to for export in anyone's kitchen. And have the bits needed for them etc magiced up via the internet.

This is the problem with you office types. No experience of the real world.

Not sure how you arrived at that.. I assume you neglected environmental costs, maintenance costs, cost of decommissioning, cost of capital, profit, cost of distribution...

See the thread on cost of repairing wind turbines...

Just heard on the radio - CCGTs are told to shut down first, before any other sectors of industry, when there's a gas shortage.

I see the link the BBC had earlier has been removed

Actual supply dropped in the last hour, just when it was set to exceed the forecast demand, have some taps been turned off?

I wonder if that is true

which radio by the way?

Perhaps finally this whole sodding debate will get public attention and what we have all being saying for years - windmills and solar panels are crap and its dangerous to rely on them - will finally get listened to.

CCGT down a little bit as some solar cuts in. Also France is able to export as well.

But this evenings peak will be crunch time...

Your moment of optimism may be... optimistic.

The ones with interruptible contracts will not even be in the market for electricity supply at the moment.

It's a sensible decision if you want to secure supplies to large population areas when there is a risk of grid disturbance with high winds and conductor icing.

You won't (Drax is missing one biomass unit from a week or so ago)

Yesterday marked the end of the three months of winter where the allocation of use of grid system charges are determined. From today demand management will be more relaxed which given the current weather makes it even more interesting

Failure *is* always an option but it is very costly £3300/MWh for loss of supply (but with lots of exclusions)

For those in the capacity market it's also 100% of their annual payments for failure to generate as required during the period of a demand control instruction. That could be £20 million / GW of installed capacity per 'event' from October 2018 onwards covering 49+GW of 'firm' generation i.e not wind

Wade through the second half of this and you can see the assumptions made for gas demand

Roughly 25% of our total annual gas consumption is for electricity generation

Gas fired generation has been down for knocking up a week now.

It could have been *MINUS* £6/MWh

Instead we have the Burbo Bank Extension

Literally just capital costs amortised - obviously I have not other numbers to add in.

If you do, it would be very instructive.

That's because much of the work you could do from home has been exported to other countries.

Its quite hard to do "do you want fries with that?" as a home worker. I expect it will be about a decade before that is automated.

I rarely agree with you but this time perhaps yopu are right

But I found this:

Bottom right hand corner. Direct link to gridwatch...

They never asked permission did they?

But its all publicity for energy and boy do we need a few less hand wavey assurances and a few more facts in the debate

Its in here:

Obviously prices and interest rates are a moving target and it was hard to arrive at O & M and lifetimes for windmills.

But the equations stand scrutiny.

I should probably rewrite that monograph...

Page numbers next time please :-)