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

[harry]

I would have thought trailing an anchor device along the seabed would be enough to cause major damage.

[harry]

We used to have a long bamboo pole with a spike, hammered in.

[johnjessop46]

I went on a YEB course for consumers authorised persons in the 70s. At the time there were sledgehammer driven spiking tools and explosive cartridge driven ones. Even at 11kv the cartridge type was much preferred by the users.

[Dave Liquorice]

Not sure Drax was ever 4 GW but not far short. What is it now though? And I'm not convinced we have 10 x 2 GW stations either that was the normal sort of size for the coal burners, the CCGT places tend to be smaller.

May 2008 when Sizewell B and Longannet (1.51 GW combined) dropped offline caused some big ripples across the entire grid and quite a number of large area blackouts. 11 other stations also going off line meant that the grid controllers really earnt their wages for most of that day.

With the very tight margins these days pick the right weather and time to "disconnect" a couple of GW from the grid and shoving it into islands or even totally off is a real possibilty.

[newshound]

In the mid 1980's Maggie set the Mergers and Monopolies Commission (MMC) on the CEGB (I remember it well). They came out with quite a glowing report on the technical competence and ethos of the organisation, their only real criticism was with planning which had led them to invest in excessive margins. And I always thought that was a bit unfair, because the planning department just (somewhat blindly) accepted the Treasury forecasts of growth, which were always on the optimistic side.

She and Parkinson got them in the end, though. The shallowness of Parkinson's economic logic came to light when, after giving all the Assets to National Power (and to a lesser extent PowerGen) and leaving all the real Liabilities in Nuclear Electric, Lord Marshall asked if he could have some of the sale proceeds please, otherwise they were asking him to run an insolvent (and therefore illegal) company. The government response was, in effect, that they had already spent them.

The CEGB books could, no doubt, be challenged on the quality of their accounting assumptions, but they did *clearly* include the nuclear liabilities, not least the costs of Sellafield decommissioning. In the late 80's, the CEGB was, however, technically solvent in spite of the costs of Sellafield, Magnox and ultimately AGR decommissioning because of the revenues from Drax and the other modern thermal plant.

[newshound]

A couple of years ago I uncovered a pair of slightly suspicious SWA cables running along the edge of my paddock, where I needed to run a land drain under them. From the geography of known supplies and potential loads, they were very likely to be obsolete. I had some dialogue with the local distributor, and they talked about sending a team along to "spike" them, which is evidently their jargon for this "chisel" approach.

In the event, it was easy enough to get the land drain in (I was only digging manually anyway) and it all went quiet. The industry got a bit nervous after an incident ten or 20 years ago where a digger driver working on a brownfield site was killed after finding a (nominally) isolate HV cable. The HSE took a site engineer to court, but it was picked up by our union, and the case was subsequently thrown out. I guess computerisation of what were once entirely paper records has reduced the risk.

[newshound]

Yes but you need to take out two or more big pylon circuits simultaneously to have a real effect. And the response teams are pretty good.

[dennis]

It wouldn't be difficult, you can get what you need in B&Q.

[charles]

Battersea power station local distribution board April 1964

[johnjessop46]

You seem to have wonderful confidence in the ability of a response team to rebuild 400 kv pylons in short order. I'm not sure your faith is founded in reality My old copy of the CEGB handbook is well out of date but the information contained in it would make serious degradation of the grid relatively simple.

[Orange]

That is a quite minor consideration for them, they are much more interested in what is happening back in the middle east.

[newshound]

I have never been on that side of the business, so I don't have any inside information. A good principle for security is not to talk about security. ISTR that the provisional IRA had a go at this once, with rather little success, and they were much better organised than the current set of idiots. I don't doubt the SAS could do it. I also rather suspect that National Grid invite SAS types to advise on countermeasures.

[Chris J Dixon]

6 x 660 MW = 3960 MW on coal

No idea if the biomass conversion maintains this output.

Chris

[The Natural Philosopher]

More or less it does yes.

Limiting factors are boilers and turbines, not what fuel you throw in, as long as you throw in enough

[Chris Hogg]

Wiki has some info on Drax. "The station has a maximum potential consumption of 36,000 tonnes of coal a day". "A byproduct of the [flue gas desulphurisation] process is gypsum, with 15,000 tonnes produced each week". Impressive numbers! Puts windmills and solar panels into perspective.

[Dave Liquorice]

Doesn't have to be simultaneously but once you'd hit one the authorities would be paying far more attention to people wandering around near pylons.

Choose your pylons, plenty of remote and isolated 400 kV pylons. Probably able to set charges days or weeks in advance and detonate by "mobile phone" within seconds of each other. Simples. Or even gas axe the legs but I wouldn't like to be close to a 400 kV live line when it fell...

The tricky bit might be getting suitable cutting charges but I'm sure ISIS have the resources. The people who actually preform attacks and blow themselves are just radicalised cannon fodder, given the tools and blindly following "orders".

If you managed to fell one pylon the increased tension in the lines will very likely bring down a neighbour, seriosuly damage them or the insulator stacks. When ice breaks even tiddly 11 kV lines, the resultant shock can snap the poles as if they are match sticks.

It'll take a while to repair/replace and check the line for "knock on" damage.

[The Natural Philosopher]

If course no one has taken the point I made on board.

It is not in terrorist interests to destroy infrastructure. They need it as much as the next man. Muslims dying of cold in tower hamlets aint good PR, bro.

Only a green would be stupid enough to do something like that, and they'd probably kill themselves trying.

No, infrastructure degradation is what you do prior to a ground invasion by military force.

[Huge]

[6 lines snipped]

"Security through obscurity" is no security at all.

[newshound]

????

If you talk in detail about how things are protected, you are making it easier for those who are trying to subvert it.

[Huge]

Nonsense.