By Paul Homewood
We’re left with demand management to stay afloat – rewarding the rich at the expense of the poor and all at the expense of taxpayers
So close, yet so far away. A few weeks ago, when the air was mild and the wind was blowing, it became fashionable to criticize Vladimir Putin. We made it through the winter of 2022/23 without the blackout he tried to cause us. Russia can keep its dirty gas and oil – we can do without them thanks to our abundant and cheap renewable energy.
Not too fast. Temperatures have plummeted again, Britain has been hit by a cyclone and the National Grid is warning that supply will be tight tonight. Coal plants are being shut down months after they were said to have closed, and the National Grid is activating what it calls Flexible Service on Demand. This means customers signed up to the scheme can earn up to £6 per kilowatt-hour saved if they agree to switch off their devices between 5 and 6pm.
It’s not hard to spot a small problem with this offer: the more electricity you use on a regular Monday, the easier it is to make money today. Like so many green subsidies, it rewards the well-to-do at the expense of the poor. If you own an 18-bedroom mansion, you can easily claim your dues by turning off the lights on the east wing and delaying recharging your Tesla until 7pm. If you normally only use one electric light bulb, there will be no savings for you. And needless to say, free electricity for some households will eventually be subsidized through higher bills for others.
But there is a much larger problem when trying to cope with wind and solar disruptions through demand management. The gaps in supply are too large to be filled in this way. The UK already has enough installed wind and solar capacity – 38 gigawatts – to theoretically meet 100% of the average electricity demand. On a clear day, such as we had two weeks ago, solar and wind generate more than 50% of our energy needs. But at 10am this morning it was down to 19% and at one point in December it fell below 2%. If you’re going to build an electricity grid based on wind and solar energy, and try to manage demand by paying people to turn off their appliances, then you’re going to have to throw in a huge amount of money. so on who they are willing to spend. the last days trembled in the dark.
The point is that more or less that’s what the Government is trying to do. Over the years, it has encouraged the green energy industry to build more and more solar and wind farms. On the other hand, energy storage has gone the way, the way behind. A few tokens – and very expensive – battery installations have been made, but along with pumped storage systems built in the 1960s and 1980s, they can only store enough energy to keep Britain running in less than an hour. Meanwhile, the stable background load provided by the kernel is shrinking as the old reactors shut down and the new ones fail to open; Hinckley C is still many years away.
Currently, we fill the void with gas-generated energy, but once we remove this from the grid, as the Government intends to do by 2035, all we will have to do. To save yourself from an unplanned outage is demand management – what is really just blackout through bribery.
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