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

[T i m]

Quite and the sun tends to be gone more predictably than it's shining ... (on the solar panels). ;-(

Cheers, T i m

[The Natural Philosopher]

They are not. They are simply laid on the seabed, but snipping a 2GW cable with a pair of cutters is not someth8inmg you would do.

mining it with a time fuse and moving 5 miles away maybe.

[The Natural Philosopher]

"Up top 1/34" diameter

Now look at a HVDC cable..

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Andrew Gabriel escribió:

Got a cite? I know they have the capability to cut fibres (and in fact are lurking near them right now) but didn't know about the power cables.

ar/

[johnjessop46]

Not much protection for the pylons :(

[Chris Hogg]

I would have thought that severing an interconnector cable was a trivial matter. Simply attach a shaped charge to it and detonate it, technology well within the capability even of minor terrorist groups, although working on the sea bed might present them with a bit of a problem. See

and

[Tim Lamb]

I was once sent on a *high voltage* switching course run by Eastern Electricity.

Before chopping through a supposedly dead cable, they had a natty device which clamped round and fired a *chisel* down a tube and into the conductors:-)

[Tim Watts]

My dad spoke of such things from the LEB in the 60's.

[Dave Liquorice]

And I doubt it would take a very big charge. All you need to do is damage it enough for the sea water to get in and the 2GW of available power will do the rest. Even if any protection trips pretty near instantly the cable is not useable and will need repair/replacing which isn't going to be a quick job.

[tony sayer]

Now that is, an interesting site;!....

[Adrian]

Quite. Take out the channel interconnect, and you've removed 2GW. That's only between 4% and 5% of demand.

Drax alone is twice that, and there's about ten other power stations of around that capacity.

Sure, you'd take a bit of headroom out, and cause some problems, but not on any grand scale.

[Chris Hogg]

To paraphrase that famous headline, "interconnect severed. Continent cut off". Whatever would they do without us?

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Adrian escribió:

The margin is currently 1%. So we would be f***ed.

[Adrian]

I notice you snipped this bit:

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Adrian escribió:

Not deliberately. But in what universe does "some problems but not on any grand scale" equate to "f***ed"?

You say we get 5% from the interconnect. Mohammed al-Fuckwitt toddles along and blows it up. The margin is 1%. So we're minus 4% which means Nat Grid has to start major load shedding which means the lights go out. In what way is that not f***ed?

Not so long ago we had 8% margin which meant we could lose the interconnect or drop a couple of power stations without it causing a major problem. Look at what happened in 2008:

the same situation today would result in /far/ worse outages.

[The Natural Philosopher]

WEll yes, shaped charge is the way to do it I think. But subsea deployment of shaped charges is a specialised thing not easily available to terrorists.

And it doesnt create the desired result. Terrorists want spectaculars - and that means body count, further oppression by the police of the 'usual suspects' and therefore more converts to the cause: 'look how they are oppressing you'...

The IRA got their best results standing behind a load of innocent Catholics firing at the Arm: Any return fire then took out enough innocent Catholics to guarantee a new set of converts, and a few million more dollars from gullible American Irish..

What Isil want more than anything is to fill Europe with migrants, foment strife between migrants and the indigenous population, and lead to a 'them or us' situation in the established muslim community, followed by protracted terroism akin to 'the troubles', leading to sharia law in a power sharing agreeement. That isn't achieved by blowing up cables.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well the point is that at times of peak demand we tend to export to France. Not import.

WE would be less affected by that than you think.

Of course times are very tifht gridwise, and a warm winter to date has meant that the urgency hasn't been noticed, BUT there are a few GW of load shedding that could be dine before we had to start cutting power to whole swathes of the country.Plus somne old oil burners and OCGT power stations and the STOR diesel sets

Yup.

[Adrian]

I don't regard 4% as "f***ed", y'see.

[charles]

we export at their peak time and import at ours. That was the design concept, anyhow. Of course if the UK adopted CET we'd have our peak times simultaneously. ;-)

[harry]

The problem is that commercial organisations are unwilling to install redundant/surplus generating capacity. It gives no return on capital. The CEGB had around 15% extra capacity ISTR.