How close were we to a blackout yesterday? – Watt?

not many people know

Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

We almost had rolling blackouts yesterday, something I didn't see reported in the media – (correct me, I could be wrong!!).

The ever-alert Katherine Porter tells the full story here.

This is her conclusion:

By the way, the reference for Viking I/C is that it managed to deliver 700 MW on a dipole that was originally intended to be taken offline for maintenance.

Here is an Elexon chart of yesterday's power generation and I/C supply:

https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/ Generation-by-fuel-type

Annoyingly, they don't seem to have an option to show which fuel category! But I've filtered out everything except biomass, combined cycle gas turbines, nuclear and wind, in that order. (I/C supply 6.3 GW at 5.30 pm, pumped hydro 4.7 GW, OCGT 0.9 GW and others 3.8 GW).

CCGT supplied 24.2 GW at the time due to depletion of biomass and nuclear generation capacity. Wind power generation capacity is 2.6 GW. It should be pointed out that wind power often drops to less than 1 GW in winter.

This particular near miss seemed to surprise NESO, as demand turned out to be 3 GW higher than expected three days earlier. As Catherine pointed out, the warning bells are already ringing for Friday night, when winds are expected to be even lighter than last night.

Why are we in this terrible mess?

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why? We shut down over 20 gigawatts of reliable coal capacity and thought we could replace it with medieval technology that only works when the wind blows!

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