UK gas/electricity supply shortages this winter

[cupid_stunt]

No that's bollocks too, it's primarily a pricing issue - supermarkets held the price down too long and producers cut back drastically as they were making big losses.

Listen to this guy from last month (or look up the trade production and pricing statistics from e.g. DEFRA or the ONS):

Farmers' of all types have been complaining about what supermarkets will paid them for many years, that's not a new thing, and yes it's been getting worst this year because of inflation, so that's an underlaying (pun not intended) problem, but the sudden current shortages have been caused by the worst outbreak of bird flu the industry has ever suffered, with getting on for 4m hens being culled recently.

Anyway, this is well off topic.

 

[elbows]

is this the time to mention that a lot of the problem with nuclear waste in the UK comes from Thatcher insisting that Scargill wasn't going to turn the lights out, so all the reactors were running over-capacity, as were the places the spent fuel was delivered to, and so they were just emptying spent fuel into ponds without tracking or audit....

so we're still not able to clean up after Thatcher's legacy of radioactive evil...

More likely we were just sloppy on site, and didnt invest enough in that side of the picture over a very long period of time, including well before Thatcher, and just kept kicking longer term spent fuel storage facility issues into the distance because such things were a political hot potato. A lot of the especially messy and hard to clean up legacy of nuclear waste at specific sites relates to the initial decades of our nuclear programme rather than what came later.

Nuclear waste is an issue even if you try to handle the situation well, and the amount of it is directly related to how many reactors you have. Well before Thatcher, the miners strike of 1972 led to plans to build over 30 new reactors, some of which would have been coming online by the start of the 1980s. This would have given us a nuclear power picture that was more like Frances. But those plans were ultimately rejected by the likes of Heath. Moving on to 1980, Thatcher announced plans to build 11 reactors, but only Sizewell ever happened. Now that we have an energy crisis, a big energy transition agenda, and the possibility to frame that stuff as an issue of national security, plenty of commentators are referencing some of these 'missed nuclear opportunities' from the past. And there are no shortage of decades to choose from where ambitious nuclear plans were floated, sometimes using similar rhetoric to that used by Johnson about 'a new reactor every year for 10 years', but never came to fruition. If any of them had, it would have led to much more nuclear waste, but I suppose the resulting scale of the industry and money spent on it might have led to the system to manage waste having been expanded to become a bit more fit for purpose.

I dont really know what 'reactors running over-capacity' might actually be referring to in practice. But the claim might relate to something highly specific that was actually done for a time in the Thatcher era, so I will not dismiss the claim out of hand right now. I would need a bit more detail about what exactly its referring to though, since its not easy to do a spinal tap and turn the reactors up to 11.

 

[elbows]

I had a poke at the claim and it seems likey that it actually relates to the 1972 miners strike:

During the miners' strike of 1972, the nation's nuclear plants were run at full stretch in order to supply electricity to a beleaguered nation. As a result, it proved impossible to process all the waste that was being generated. Cladding and fuel were simply thrown into B38's cooling ponds and left to disintegrate.

Sellafield: the most hazardous place in Europe

Engineers estimate it could cost up to £50bn to clean Sellafield up over the next 100 years

www.theguardian.com

Theres a lot of mess at Sellafield, from 3 generations of nuclear power tech in this country (I'm calling the WIndscale piles at that site the first gen, which is also where the first big nuclear power accident happened). I will look into the detail of B38 at some point and compare it to the other sorts of mess there. During Thatchers era there were a number of reasons why she would have been associated with this stuff - she was pro-nuclear and there was still a lot of big talk about the nuclear future. There was plenty of talk about the fuel cycle and fuel reprocessing, both because there were still hopes in regards fast breeder reactors, and also because THORP was approved before Thatcher came to power. This was the Sellafield facility for reprocessing the fuel from our second big generation of nuclear power plants, the AGR ones, most of which finally came online during Thatchers time. THORP didnt open till 1994 but Thatcher would have presided over the era when construction got going and was probably involved in related photo opportunities. Also by Thatchers time the entire site had a very poor reputation due to various accidents and data about contamination. The Windscale inquiry had reported on many of the issues in the late 1970's and it was during Thatchers time that a big chunk of the Windscale site was rebranded as Sellafield.

Anyway there are ongoing issues from all of those eras of fuel reprocessing etc, and for example THORP cannot be claimed to have been a success:

Sellafield’s THORP reprocessing plant – an Epitaph: “Never did what it said on the tin”

corecumbria.co.uk

The legacy of waste from the initial Windscale piles, the MAGNOX power stations and the AGR power stations can all be found at Windscale/Sellafield. What could fairly be pinned on Thatcher in terms of the nuclear picture would be the impact of privatisation on the industry in the decades that followed. The mess would still have been there, with or without Thatcher. And reprocessing and waste issues are not being talked about properly at all during the current time when the big talk about nuclear in our future is back in vogue - if this country does as badly on these issues as it did in the past, we'll have a lot more mess in future. And this side of the picture is one of many reasons why the economics of nuclear are extremely hard to balance in a positive direction.

 

[gentlegreen]

Windscale continues to make my jaw drop - fuel rods and moderator built into a bloody chimney and pushed into a gutter...
... but then those were the days of nuclear weapons tests ...

 

[elbows]

Windscale continues to make my jaw drop - fuel rods and moderator built into a bloody chimney and pushed into a gutter...
... but then those were the days of nuclear weapons tests ...

And where actually putting a filter on top of the chimney was sneered at and named Cockrofts Folly until the fire where it proved to be anything but a folly. That sort of history formed a part of what educated me about the attitudes and priorities of the establishment in this country.

Turning the cooling fans up to try to help the fire situation wasnt exactly a genius idea either. At least they eventually figured out that turning them off was the right thing to do when facing a fire. Thats up there with bulldozing the cliffs during Fukushimas construction to save money, only to face a tsunami decades later. Its fair to say I remain unconvinced that this low standard of human exploits are really compatible with safely exploiting nuclear physics for the purposes of generating energy.

 

[elbows]

I poked around a bit more and so far I dont find the 1972 story all that compelling in the grand scheme of things. Mostly because there were broader issues with reprocessing Magnox fuel, and there has been a very long history of problems with reprocessing in this country. There is no doubt that a significant backlog built up over time, and that options for dealing with Magnox fuel were more limited due to a corrosion issue, limiting the ability to make use of dry storage for that fuel type. I am unable to ascertain at this time whether specific issues in 1972 made the situation with the B38 storage facility decommissioning much worse than it would otherwise have been. What is clear is that both B30 ('dirty thirty') and B38 would have been a giant messy nightmare to deal with anyway, and these facilities at Sellafield are often labelled as the first and second most dangerous buildings of this type in europe. For now the reprocessing of all the main types has come to an end in this country, and we are now well into the very long and dirty decommissioning phase for those facilities. Even the future of fuel enrichment and manufacturing in this country remains uncertain for now, since its linked to what designs of reactors we go with in future, and so far the new builds have been of French design. Military and other factors means we are likely to want to maintain some capacity and our own capability in this regard, but quite how that will end up looking is currently less than clear. Maybe reprocessing will never get a look in again, or certainly wont rise to the giddy heights of hype from many decades ago that enabled these reprocessing facilities to be funded in the first place. If our reprocessing industry had been a commercial success that hit its targets then the story may have been different, but would have been no less messy an endeavour so I cant say I'm sorry that its gone from the scene.

Anyway during the course of looking into this I did find a chart fro nuclear energy generation per year, which I can use to highlight that 1972 didnt end up standing out in terms of yearly totals (it ended up very similar to 1969s output), and also to drag this thread back towards its intended purpose by demonstrating the UK nuclear generation story so far:



Chart is from Analysis: UK nuclear output falls to lowest level since 1982 - Carbon Brief

Cant really pin the big increases seen in the 1980s on Thatcher since these were mostly down to a whole bunch of new nuclear power stations coming online, with the subsequent peak occuring due to a combination of these and Sizewell B running in conjunction with the Magnox generation of reactors not yet having reached end of life.

And I suppose I was never going to find the strike angle that compelling because generally all countries want to run their nuclear fleet at as close to full capacity as they can get all of the time, because the economics of nuclear already suck so you want to try to get as much out of the fleet as possible. The only exception to this is France because they ended up building more nuclear capacity than demand ended up needing, focring them to run things at suboptimal levels. And even they tried to somewhat compensate for that by building up their ability to export electricity to other countries.

 

[elbows]

By the way someone at one of the recent select committee hearings into nuclear power said that the AGR construction, which is what led to that large increase in generation during the 1980s, was regarded as the largest and most expensive public procurement disaster of all time in this country. But I havent read up on that from other sources, I only know more broadly how long the delays and how large the cost overruns were for a bunch of the reactors in that scheme.

Anyway I am intermittently trying to cover the broader nuclear story in the thread about the future of nuclear power in the climate change forum ( The case against nuclear power - does it stack up? ). I am currently overdue with writing up my notes from the previous select committee meeting. I have discovered that even if I place to one side a whole set of my concerns about nuclear safety, waste issues etc, I still end up broadly in tune with the current view of the UK National Infrastructure Commission. They arent keen on us committing to a large pipeline of future nuclear projects at this stage, preferring the government to do the bare minimum to keep future nuclear options on the table, hedging our bets in case the alternatives end up winning the argument in the next 10-20 years. Keeping the nuclear options on the table in case they are needed still involved having to approve the likes of Hinkley and Sizewell C in the present era, since no projects at all would kill off the industry and skills, but beyond that the economics and timescales for nuclear cause enough concern that we shouldnt put too many eggs in that basket all over again at this time.

 

[rich!]

thanks for digging those out elbows.

I was told the Thatcher story by someone involved in pond cleanup so I had no reason to doubt it on face value, shame it may not be as factual as one might like...

 

[Artaxerxes]

Caved in and started researching boiler repairs, texted the landlord the British gas local heroes site. It's fucking cold

 

[elbows]

thanks for digging those out elbows.

I was told the Thatcher story by someone involved in pond cleanup so I had no reason to doubt it on face value, shame it may not be as factual as one might like...

Cheers, no problem. If I can manage to find more than the one liner from the Guardian about what happened in 1972 then I'll provide you with an update, and there is always some chance it could be applied to the 1980s too, it just wont change the fact that those storage facilities would have sucked to clean up anyway.

 

[WouldBe]

Now 600,000 litres of water pumped out of gas pipes.

 

[elbows]

Recent days werent as tight as last time, since although the wind dropped it was still producing quite a few MW, and there was more nuclear available, and now the weekend has reduced demand.

However Monday is currently looking tight, and the wind has dwindled to pathetic levels of generation today. So I was not surprised that they've gone ahead and stuck some more Demand Flexibility Service 'test' periods in for tomorrow. I havent looked at the details properly yet but it sounded like it might be for twice as long as seem previously, 2 hours, from 5PM to 7PM on Monday.

 

[cupid_stunt]

Recent days werent as tight as last time, since although the wind dropped it was still producing quite a few MW, and there was more nuclear available, and now the weekend has reduced demand.

However Monday is currently looking tight, and the wind has dwindled to pathetic levels of generation today. So I was not surprised that they've gone ahead and stuck some more Demand Flexibility Service 'test' periods in for tomorrow. I havent looked at the details properly yet but it sounded like it might be for twice as long as seem previously, 2 hours, from 5PM to 7PM on Monday.

We've also been importing a lot of electric today, currently imports account for 18.3% of our demand.

 

[elbows]

We've also been importing a lot of electric today, currently imports account for 18.3% of our demand.

Yes indeed. I've just prepared some graphs to tell part of the story and imports are quite the factor, we have to lean on them heavily when wind drops to very low levels.

These graphs show the story with a few sources since the last time things were rather tight, in late November. We can see that our missing nuclear capacity has been restored over the period (and it looks like we now got the last missing reactor back from refuelling recently), which helps but this gain is still modest in the grand scheme of MW required to meet demand. And we can see the how imports are required to meet peak demand on days where the wind falls to the sort of pathetic level that it has now fallen back down to again. The import capacity we have cannot fully compensate for this level of wind drop, but Im not going to go crazy by trying to show graphs for every power source right now. I will do another graph showing sources combined into overall totals at some point though.

Sorry that the date/time labels are crap, no time to make them better since the raw data labels everything as the date combined with half hour periods numbered 1 to 48 each day.

 

[elbows]

A disgusting colour clash attempt to show the entire picture over the same time period. Combined some sources into single entries.

Can see that demand has been higher this weekend than last weekend, so havent been able to reduce use of gas over weekend like we could previously, due to combination of demand and lack of wind.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

My heat bill just went up again, by 15%. This is the third raise in the last year and has gone up about 38% for the year.

 

[two sheds]

I was idly wondering whether solar is producing enough to show up on those graphs and thinking it probably wouldn't, but:

About 24.3% of the UK’s total electricity demand has been covered by solar power. This was reported by representatives of the State Electricity System of the country National Grid UK. Solar generated 8.7 GW on May 26, 2021, breaking the previous UK record set on May 10 of 8.48 GW.
...
Barwell added that this is the first recorded case in the UK where solar panels generate more energy than nuclear installations. However, natural gas and coal are still the leading energy suppliers in the country.

Solar Energy UK Statistics 2021: Outlook and Achievements - SolarFeeds Magazine

Did you know that the share of solar energy in the UK is almost 25% for 2021? Can you imagine that in 30 years, the UK will build a solar power plant in orbit? We will talk about this and not only in our article.

www.solarfeeds.com

strange it's not shown on them?

 

[cupid_stunt]

My heat bill just went up again, by 15%. This is the third raise in the last year and has gone up about 38% for the year.

Lucky you.

My electric use is up 75% compared to last Dec, and gas up 165%.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Lucky you.

My electric use is up 75% compared to last Dec, and gas up 165%.

It's true. I am lucky by comparison. I keep hearing absolute horror stories from people abroad or who use home heating oil. I hope you're managing to stay warm this winter.

 

[cupid_stunt]

It's true. I am lucky by comparison. I keep hearing absolute horror stories from people abroad or who use home heating oil. I hope you're managing to stay warm this winter.

TBH, this is off topic for this thread, see the How cold is your house one, I am very lucky compared to many, first 6 days of this month I was using around £2 a day on gas heating, that's gone up to an average of £4,50 a day since the cold snap started, likely to be near £6 today, before dropping back down next week, and that's in a well insulated home, with a brand new efficient boiler, and heating to slightly lower temperatures (16-17c) compared to last year.

 

[elbows]

I was idly wondering whether solar is producing enough to show up on those graphs and thinking it probably wouldn't, but:

Solar Energy UK Statistics 2021: Outlook and Achievements - SolarFeeds Magazine

Did you know that the share of solar energy in the UK is almost 25% for 2021? Can you imagine that in 30 years, the UK will build a solar power plant in orbit? We will talk about this and not only in our article.

www.solarfeeds.com

strange it's not shown on them?

There are numerous different forms of electricity data and a couple of different sources. I've used one particular type for the above graphs, partly because its easier for me to process in an ongoing way.

One of the reasons things like solar are absent from that dataset is that most solar is embedded within the system, they cant measure solar generation in near-realtime like they can many other sources. I'm not 100% clear on how accurately they can measure generation built into this side of the sustem at all, some of it may be estimated based on what impact they believe its having on demand at any moment in time, the weather, time of year, daylight hours and known installed capacity.

They reckon we had nearly 14GW of solar installed capacity towards the end of 2021 which is significant amount. However what we are going to get out of it at this time of year is not so significant, so my current thinking is that its absence from graphs of the current situation is not really spoiling the picture I am showing. I may post some example data for very recent solar numbers in order to illustrate this point.

 

[elbows]

I should also point out that a fair chunk of wind is also embedded.

Here for example is a national grid forecast for embedded solar and wind for the next 14 days. But keep in mind that this shows entire days worth of forecast output in megawatt hours, so you cant compare the figures directly with the ones I used in graphs, although you could compare my graphs to the mix and max MWs for the period that they also list on this page.

Embedded Solar and Wind Forecast | ESO

data.nationalgrideso.com

One other example, from a different sources 'actual or estimated' solar figures for today, solar peaked at just 1314MW at the best time of day today. So I dont feel too bad aout leaving it out at the moment. It would just be adding some small looking bumps to my graphs every day. The bumps look more impressive in summer.

 

[mx wcfc]

Have you got anything comparing last year with this year? Are people cutting back usage?

Or is it too difficult to tell, given the different weather?

 

[elbows]

Have you got anything comparing last year with this year? Are people cutting back usage?

Or is it too difficult to tell, given the different weather?

As you imply, doing it fairly to account for weather differences would require more procerssing and interpretation than I'm setup to provide. I'll probably leave that to official statistics bodies etc, who will also report on this over broader timescales.

I've also not looked at pure demand data very much, I've tended to infer it from what we are generating and importing. I might do something more on this front anyway, but it will still just be raw stuff rather than adjusted for weather etc. I'm sure I'll stick it here if I do.

Meanwhile just continuing with the point about solar, it can still be of some use at this time of year I suppose. Using the final source of data where I got the 1314MW figure from in previous post, its tedious for me to process this data and glue it together for longer periods, so I onyl attempted to do this for the first few weeks in November before I stopped. But here is a graph of that anyway, but take it with a pinch of salt. There were a few occasions in the first half of November where it didnt seem irrelevant compared to the onshore and offshore wind figures they came up with for those time periods.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

TBH, this is off topic for this thread, see the How cold is your house one, I am very lucky compared to many, first 6 days of this month I was using around £2 a day on gas heating, that's gone up to an average of £4,50 a day since the cold snap started, likely to be near £6 today, before dropping back down next week, and that's in a well insulated home, with a brand new efficient boiler, and heating to slightly lower temperatures (16-17c) compared to last year.

I don't get that much data. Our bill is figured by a budget plan where they estimate how much you'll use in a year, and divide by 12. My current budget is about $4 a day, summer and winter. I'm not sure what the exchange rate would be.

 

[elbows]

BBC article on todays situation. Includes stuff like:

It means demand for energy rises as more people heat their homes, and a lack of wind has reduced the amount of renewable energy available.

It is understood because of the cold temperatures, Monday will be the highest demand day for electricity so far this winter.

National Grid said that while it had asked Drax to warm up its two coal-fired units at its site near Selby, North Yorkshire, the plants might not be used. It said the move "should give the public confidence in Monday's energy supply" and added households should "continue to use energy as normal".

The UK receives electricity via subsea cables from European countries including France, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands, but higher demand in Europe could potentially disrupt supplies to the UK and would trigger the need for coal-generated energy.

National Grid: Coal plants stood down to supply electricity

National Grid stands down coal-fired units but will run a test to pay people to cut peak-time use.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[elbows]

Oh and I would say that some of their wording about coal in that article has the potential to mislead. They are making it sound a bit like we havent needed to use coal till now, but actually we've been generating some electricity from coal pretty much continually since 27th November. If Drax is required today then that number will go higher, but its not starting from zero.

 

[2hats]

Might get away with it today.

Javier Blas (@JavierBlas)

The UK has cancelled the order to prepare two of the coal-fired power units it keeps in reserve for emergencies. The electricity market has eased a bit, and looks like gas will be enough to cover the evening demand peak period (the morning peak went also without problem)

nitter.net

 

[elbows]

Might get away with it today.

Javier Blas (@JavierBlas)

The UK has cancelled the order to prepare two of the coal-fired power units it keeps in reserve for emergencies. The electricity market has eased a bit, and looks like gas will be enough to cover the evening demand peak period (the morning peak went also without problem)

nitter.net

Yeah I will still treat 'getting away with it' as the more likely scenario on most occasions because of the number of mechanisms they've got to manage the situation on both the supply and demand side.

Take for example the sort of prices I''ve seen via some websites today:

"High offer accepted - Coryton Power Station accepted at £1500/MWh"

And I can get a sense of how much the situation is improving as the day goes on and the market responds by comparing the Loss of Load Probability and De-rated Margin figures for the 12 hour forecast to the subsequent 8 hour, 4 hour, 2 hour and 1 hour forecasts as they come in:

Loss of Load Probability (LoLP) and De-rated Margin | BMRS

So for today the 12 hour forecast had a number of periods during the peak in demand where the margin was negative and the loss of load probability percentage was into the 90's, but the 8 hour forecast now covers those periods and shows an improvement, and later what will typically happen is that the 4,2 and 1 hour forecasts will show further or similar improvement. Not that Im entirely complacent about this, what we take mostly for granted involves loads of people have to spend their working days managing these situations as a matter of routine, let alone when it gets as tight as todays initial forecasts implied.

 

[cupid_stunt]

Imports are up to 14.8% of current demand, fingers crossed that that can continue.