OT Britain's electricity supplies at risk due to closure of coal-fired generators

Luckily we can rely on renewables .... oh sorry, no we can't. ;-(

Maybe now *is* the time to wire my UPS into the lighting circuits? ;-)

Cheers, T i m

Well we've had several breaks down here in Sussex over the last few days, so I hope it's not a sign of what's to come. Demand going up, provision going down, doesn't make for good reading.

Andy C

Lights a bit flickery today and I've heard the UPS buck/boost kick in several times ... more than likely just some branches getting zapped in the wind!

Well, yes. It's not terribly economic to generate electricity, so we'll just have to go without. Market forces, after all. You know it makes sense.

The chinless drone on the telly said we make it up by buying it from the continent. Note to terrorists, blow up cable next winter. Brian

in the last week we were exporting flat out to France, to help their lights stay on, more than a few times a day.

The only valid conclusion to draw is that what politicians say bears no more than a random correlation with what is actually happening.

Blow up an underwater cable?

They could lift it from the seabed and snip it with a pair of wire cutters... oh, wait...

En el artículo , Brian Gaff escribió:

Except if some MP's have their way, there won't be any more interconnectors. The pylons that link to them spoil the view, you see.

And anyway it assumes that there'll be spare electricity buzzing around just waiting to be snapped up.

And yet they have the largest proportion of theirs generated by nuclear of any country in the world - approximately 80%? And given it's your solution in the UK, how can they possibly need our help?

You can be reasonably sure the good guys have thought of this. There is more security on access to grid control centres than civil nuclear power stations. (Rightly so).

IIRC, France was supplying power to quite a lot of Europe at the time, especially Germany, and even if not at that time, then it does so a lot of the time. It's not a criticism of their nukes that they were importing from us, merely that they didn't have enough of them.

newshound scribbled

There's sod all security around pylons and transformer stations.

Dave Plowman (News) scribbled

Supply and demand. Socialism at work innit.

Russians have had the technology to do that for some time, ready for when the next war breaks out.

Non sequitur

I think they are buried, but all you need to do is get enough explosive close enough.

Slightly changing the subject, I once had a project where, for emergency recovery purposes, we might have to cut a high tensile steel cable with remote access. Our contractors on the job were a part of GEC, who (as it happens), are quite close to various Royal Navy applications. They immediately said "No problem, we know exactly how to do that". With a little bit of prompting it seemed likely that they have cutters actuated by pyrotechnics. My surmise was that they have devices for cutting the tether cable of mines, or perhaps for anti-submarine netting, or trawler cables.

like these

Small ones are only a couple of hundred dollars

Owain

Scottish Power have a TV advert about their wind farms at the moment ... doesn't mention anything about the wind not blowing all the time.

Owain