Gridwatch news

[Bob Minchin]

+1 That is sort of the way I used to interpret the old dials.

[Dave Liquorice]

Wonkypedia... wouldn't like to vouch for it's accuracy. Mind you I'm not sure I trust the RWE or E.ON sites either!

I was half think that as well. I guess a good starting point would be that BM Reports spreadsheet mentioned earlier

But Cameroon (or at least HMG) has said "the lights will not go out".

I bet that has started a bit background scrabbling by the civil servants to negociate the price for relatively short notice removal of mothballs without the firing up of some stations dependant on how the winter pans out. They'll risk a couple of close calls but if we have a week or more of severe cold (think 2009/10 and 10/11), they will start to throw money at the problem, lights going out will cost votes...

Of course the statement "the lights will not go out" shouldn't be taken at face value as it has been spoken by a politician. If the lights go out because we have another Dungeness incident at peak demand that won't count as it's "exceptional weather" not "lack of margin". The fact that Dungeness fell off line last month without causing any major problems will be ignored.

[Chris J Dixon]

OTOH, the press will be up in arms if any of those industrial customers who have signed up, as a commercial choice, for an interruptible supply, actually have their supply interrupted. The clue is in the name. ;-)

Chris

[Ken]

Just a minor point - in the biomass tooltips it gives the impression that Steven's Croft is an ex-coal plant. It's not, it was purpose built for biomass (timber processing plant right next door and the waste from that goes to the power station).

Thanks again for the effort you've put into providing this site. I can confirm it gets used in at least two schools locally.

Ken.

[The Natural Philosopher]

it wont be. There are a lot of people in the MSM picking up on this story.

I got a call from a bloke at the Sun.

Never paid me for what I sent him though. Be warned ;-)

I think there is a 'who turned of the lights' story sitting at news international waiting to be dusted off and printed by candlelight,..

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ok will fix that.

[tony sayer]

Bit hypothetical but..

Mike might know the answer to this one.

Suppose a large coal gen station goes t*ts up, its one of those nice winter highs so no windmills are being stirred across the UK and its bloody cold in Europe to. Theres a bit of a problem with the Gas supply somewhere over the other side of the channel. And of course one of our Nuke stations has a problem .. its getting the be the perfect storm for UK power supply..

The UK power supply can no longer meet demand and rolling power cuts are on the go and are causing large disquiet.

Now theres a coal station that "could" be bought back into use in a few days thats just time expired under some EU plan. Would the government do that to keep the UK on the go or not?. If they did I suppose the EU might say shut it down but then we say No, what are you going to do about it?.

So what happens do we just get fined a lot of money or what?....

[newshound]

Fascinating. Presumably the mothballed sites retain minimum staff to keep the plant healthy; do they then bring in operations staff from other stations when they want to run them, or perhaps retired staff? Sounds like a massive waste of relatively scarce manpower. And we used to think the CEGB was inefficient......

[The Natural Philosopher]

Coal plants that have been even partially decommissioned cant ve brought back online. Mothballed mensass that. Full of oil, cleaned , in good working order,ALLPARTS STILL THERE and probably unmanned except for routine maintenance and able to be fired up if not a moments notice at least in a day or two.

The grid does forward capacity planning and would know in advance when demand would be very tight and issue instructions BUT what it cant do is predict a broken pipe in a steam turbine etc. The loss of one power station can be covered by turning hydro and pumped up flat out , opening the steam valves on the coal and nuclear, and dropping frequency and voltage,. That's step 1. Using what energy is in boilers and water to postpone the real issue. then normally extra CCGT capacity is brought up.

IF that CCGT capacity were not there though, then we are in trouble, and we have to bring STOR online and start cutting off discretionary users. Like Ireland :-) and begging watts from the French, if they have any left spare.

that might not be enough though if the ICTs are already maxed out.

What is most worrisome however is that apart from a footnote explaining that their calculations are nonsense, because renewable energy cant be relied upon to provide any capacity whatsoever in an emergency, is the fact that DECC DOES assume so.

Its a thread that runs through their calculations. Use of average wind power to represent something solid dependable and meaningful, when they simply are none of the above.

Better is this OFGEM document

its worth a read because it explains how they arrive at risks and what the contingency plans are.

realistically what we might be in for is short duration cuts at around the evening peak for selected UK areas. Not a total show stopper, but deeply embarrassing nonetheless.

[HarpingOn]

I did hear from leisure center staff last year that they weren't allowed to adjust the heating controls in the swimming pool because the owning company [of the leisure center] had hacked into the nuclear powerstations and would know about it. The staff were utterly convinced this was true.

Turns out, the head office guy was blagging them with gridwatch :/

Thanks for the site by the way. It's dead good.

[The Other Mike]

Both I and my source need to keep a relatively low profile :)

Depends on your definition of 'a lot'

600MW at Drax now running with very similar loading profiles to the coal fired plant, 2 x 350MW maybe eventually increasing to 2 x 450MW at Ironbridge with limited running hours. Should be about 1350MW of Biomass on the bars for 8am Tuesday although there are rumours that Ironbridge has continuing plant problems and that their fuel supply chain is a bit 'broken'

There is another 600MW conversion at Drax around Q3/4 next year with another

600MW conversion sometime in 2015. Aberthaw B (3 x 500MW) has been partial dual firing (10% ish) for a few years now but has always been declared as coal. In addition Nothing else 'big' planned as far as I know, all remaining coal fired sites are either LCPD opted in or opted out and unconverted and about to close with no incentive for conversion, so replanting or more likely demolition is to be expected. Didcot being a case in point. There have been a handful of biomass proposals announced in recent years for opted in coal sites and at least one cancellation in the past month or so, (1GW owned by GdF at Rugeley that is now remaining coal fired)

Yes.

Yes, but none that should be discussed in polite company.

There are a number of people who would gladly bury an ice pick in the heads of the slimy bastards that are royally taking the piss with STOR. The scheme was only ever intended for demand reduction, an extension of what happened before

1990. It got hijacked by a group of spivs on both sides of the table to line certain pockets. It would have been cheaper and more sensible to simply let the lights go out.

[The Other Mike]

'Clean' is a problem and a simple conversion to biomass doesn't reset the hours clock. 'opting in' now is not an option. A full replanting could be a possibility.

It'll be interesting to see what the future plans are for Ferrybridge when half of the 1960's built plant runs out of hours this winter. The other half is opted in and appears to have a future with dirt cheap imported coal, albeit with massively reduced NOx emissions from 2016 onwards. In the interim there is one current 'multifuel' aka biomass plant being built alongside and another one planned. 68MW for the first one, costing 300 million and half their golf course, the second one just 50MW and the other half of the golf course.

Drax Units 1,2 and 3, from the oldest half of the site dating from the mid 70's are being converted to 100% biomass over the next two years. Unit 2 is the first of the three and is already up and running at around 600MW net (the coal fired units are 660MW generated, 645 MW net)

Yep, they are both closed.

Yes it's the last supergrid connected oil burner in mainland UK.

A number of black start sites have retained that status despite the closure of the main generation. Fawley for example. 1GW of oil lost about 15 years ago, the remaining 1GW lost earlier this year but with 70MW of black start (distillate fuelled OCGT's) retained at least for a couple of years, maybe more. There are enough black start sites around for it not to be too much of an issue.