Not seen so much FF generation for a long time. Total demand close to 45GW, Coal seemingly nearly flat out at 3.57GW (8%), CCGT going nearly flat out I guess, bugger all wind, no sunshine of course, the three interconnects to the continent flat out (although we are passing on some of it the Ireland), and even OCGT up and higher than I've seen for quite a while.
Wadya think Harry; how would we manage ATM without coal, gas, nuclear and OCGT? We wouldn't, of course.
The trick is having diverse ways to generate. What is missing is a good storage of electricity. Its been the problem since the dawn of electricity generation. Brian
It was squeaky bum time
The forecast derated margin at 1 hour ahead evaporated to 213MW this evening for the period 1830-1900
The system buy price then spiked at £2242/MWh at 1830
And it wasn't even that cold.
It doesn't always need to be cold as in user charging terms it was technically 'not winter' and so there was no need for triad avoidance by firing up embeded generation or reducing demand at distribution level.
Triad avoidance reduces the per kW max demand and per kWh rate during the entire year for many non-domestic users. The triad periods are the three half hours over the entire winter period November to February with the highest system demands, each Triad must be separated by 10 days from any other period. The actual Triads are formally announced at the end of Winter, the provisional ones are updated throughout the winter.
Using operational metering at 1800h the demand was 45649MW, the highest demand over the entire winter period using the same metering was actually 6MW lower -
1700h on 2nd Dec 2019 and chances are that was a cold day.Often the smallest margins happen in early Autumn with generation yet to come back from major overhaul coinciding with a sudden cold snap. That was still the case before any real penetration of wind or solar.
So yesterday, like almost every day from March to the end of October, was an example of unmanaged and unconstrained demand.
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Nuclear seems to be a bit low - is one or more stations down for refuelling, maintenance or whatever? Odd time of year for the first two, I would have thought, when demand is likely to be highest.
I find our heating is more related to wind than temperature.
ARE one or two stations down..,,
The answer is linked to from Gridwatch
That's 8 reactors - about 4.5GW, half the fleet, out for mainly routine maintenance.
I don't pretend to understand outage scheduling, although I can tell you that a lot of effort goes into it. I've been surprised by the winter outages too, but there will be a reason for it! I must ask around.
Sometimes an outage will be set by a committment to the ONR to carry out inspections by a certain date.
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