Demand falls over the Christmas period so there is probably a sense that they have dodged the prospects of an emergency in December.
When the National Grid did their winter forecast, one of their modelled scenarios showed the tightest period happening in December through to part of January, with a period of respite over Christmas, and the timing of low wind meant that so far this has been broadly in tune with what actually happened. But their scenario where all of the wiggle room was eaten up over that time and the shit hit the fan involved greatly restricted imports due to the likes of Frances nuclear woes, and so far we dodged that and imports still happened when we needed them. We can probably thanks things like Frances capacity to have hydro respond during peak times, and the imports France has managed to get from other countries, for that. The other doom scenario they modelled, for a time period we havent had yet, involves gas shortages in January leading to a massive drop in gas generation for a time. If that doesnt happen and there is no combination of other unforseen circumstances leading to a similar result, then we'll probably get away with this winter without any big impact on energy users. Attention will then start to move towards the subsequent winter, where past reporting implied the concerns about how Europe will fare have been far more acute than they were for this current winter. Thats probably because Europe did so well at filling up its gas reserves this time, but there are concerns about its prospects of repeating that feat given loss of gas pipelines imports and the amount of gas left in storage once the current winter ends. If LNG imports coupled with lower consumption can bridge the gap to a meaningful extent, and the weather isnt too unkind, then maybe they could get away with it again next winter too, much too early to tell.
In regards Frances nuclear situation, they havent quite reached a point where I can breathe a full sigh of relief, but they've got much closer to that point recently. The amount of reactor restarts they managed to achieve in the first few weeks of November added to my concern, as did the number of restart dates that werte pushed back, but they've done very much better in the weeks that have followed. When I started looking in early November, on paper they planned to get 18GW of nuclear back over November and December, with about two thirds of that happening in November. That didnt happen, they got well behind, but due to progress in December they've now got about 11GW back. And they may get a few GW more back by the end of December. That will still leave them approximately a month behind what they had on paper, but I dont think they expected that plan to match what would actually happen in the first place. Especially considering the restart plans had already been massively revised downwards a number of times in prior months, long before we even got to November and the version of the plan I looked at in detail. What has actually been achieved hasnt given France as much wiggle room as they would have wanted to cope with Decembers weather, but so far it looks like its been 'just enough', and it did feature successes that had been absent all year prior. When their government announced a system for alerting users when they needed to reduce consumption urgently. much of their focus was on January as being the main phase of danger. In the last couple of weeks confidence has increased there that they will avoid that fate, but like I said, I'd like to see a bit more nuclear wiggle room created before I can reach a state of relative complacency.
