Oh look. No solar , sod all wind

[Andy Burns]

Looks like the evening peak started mid-morning instead ...

[tony sayer]

3.11 odd Gw's of Coal barely 1.9 of Wind...

[Dave Liquorice]

Yes, yesterday and today have had fairly flat and high day time demand profiles. Unlike the working days last week (or even the weekend) with lower demand morning/afternoon and defined early evening peak.

Why?

[Roland Perry]

In message [e-mail]>, at

23:21:24 on Tue, 21 Jan 2020, Dave Liquorice [e-mail] remarked:

It's been colder.

[The Other Mike]

Quite possibly Triad avoidance

The three peak half hour demands over the period November to February, separated by 10 days determine how the Transmission Use of System charges are apportioned to commercial and industrial consumers.

The Grid Operator regularly publishes the predicted Triad demands and weeks in which they might occur but the possible Triads (as in day and half hour period) are published the day after the event with the actual Triads formally declared after the end of the Triad period.

A common industry practice by utilities is prediction of the actual Triads as avoidance of demand in a Triad equates to lower bills for the rest of the year.

Triads should normally but not always occur at around 1600-1900 hours, but they will always be on weekdays, so it makes sense to push your own peak usage to outside that period which also avoids a clash with the domestic peak at

1800-1900. So the usual outcome is a much flatter demand curve.

So in a production environment running with the possibility of a flexible and variable downtime, a shift changeover between say 4pm and 8pm with maintenance performed in those periods can pay huge benefits. You just run production longer, faster and harder away from the triad periods such as overnight or indeed most of the day away from the peak demand times.

But it's all temperature, wind chill and light level dependent.

Take yesterday as an example, the forecast demand peak was 46480MW at 17:30, the actual was 45318MW at 19:00

The three previous highest demands that met the Triad criteria were 44292MW at

17:00 on the 18th November, 44102MW at 17:00 on 2nd December and 43487MW at 16:30 on 17th December.

So pending any futures peaks until the end of February, yesterday, 21st January, was almost certainly a Triad day, having both higher demand than all three previous Triad peaks and meeting the criteria of being separated by 10 days from all of them.

--

[Andy Burns]

It's been coldish, but not *really* cold (in the Wet Mudlands anyway) frost managing to stay on the ground in shady locations all day long.

I suppose TNP has looked to see if the data is available for a "gaswatch" site?

[Andy Burns]

Meanwhile globally 1783GW, with a further 232GW under construction and

306GW planned (drag the slider from "2018" to "future")

While we will have turned all ours off in a couple of years Germany, Poland, Greece, Czech are still building/planning new ones

[Andrew]

Also Bangladesh, to build more coal-fired generators to ??replace an earlier arrangement with Aggreko