UK gas/electricity supply shortages this winter

[platinumsage]

EDF use algorithms to work this out from our smart meter data, which is pretty cool:

 

[Serge Forward]

And when you're away for a 2 week holiday, the EDF techs will know and will be round your gaff to nick your stuff. Probably

 

[platinumsage]

And when you're away for a 2 week holiday, the EDF techs will know and will be round your gaff to nick your stuff. Probably

Yeah BT staff used to burglarize homes all the time when people didn't use their landline for a week.

 

[Serge Forward]

The monsters

 

[gentlegreen]

I can't believe they ever implemented it in the university where I worked, but when the phone system was upgraded there were rumours that HR would be paying attention to unanswered calls - to work out if people were absent when they shouldn't be ...

 

[cupid_stunt]

Smart meters can be switched from quarterly in arrears to pre-payment by the electricity company remotely, and with no recourse on the part of the customer.

They should only do that if you have built-up a large debt, haven't agreed a payment plan, or broken such a plan - the same reasons for physically replacing your dumb meters with pre-payment meters - if they don't carry out the correct procedures, as seems to be the case with a small number of people, then you have recourse via the energy ombudsman.

As I pointed out on the other thread, if they are going to cock-up like that, personally I would rather they did it remotely, instead of me coming home to find they have forced entry to install a pre-payment meter.

 

[elbows]

Since this was supposed to be a busy period for French nuclear restarts, I've been keeping an eye on it.

So far of the reactors previously scheduled to come back in the last week and over the next week:

1 managed to restart yesterday and is gradually ramping up power over the next few days.
1 restarted 4 days ago but the restart was very quickly aborted, waiting to see if they try again tomorrow (as currently scheduled) or keep pushing the date further into the future.
4 others had their restart dates pushed back by 9-10 days so far.

There were 10 scheduled restarts during this period, waiting to see if the remaining 4 + the previously aborted one happen during this period (up to Nov 19th) or get pushed back.

Meanwhile the weather is still being kind, although the period of very impressive wind came to an end a few days ago.

An update to that French nuclear picture:

2 of the reactors have now restarted, the one I mentioned yesterday and the one that previously had an aborted restart. They havent ramped up to anything like their full power yet.

The other ones I was waiting to see what happened with their restart days have almost all had their restart dates pushed back a little bit again. So at the moment I am only expecting one more to possibly restart by the 18th, with 9 others currently hoping to restart later in November.

Also one reactor that was previously working shutdown yesterday and today they pushed its restart date back to 25th November. So I cant really claim that they have significantly more nuclear generation available than when I first started looking at this picture of France in full detail. Having said that, there was one reactor that restarted days before I started looking properly, and it achieved pretty much full power by November 10th.

Meanwhile in the UK we have had 2 Heysham reactors down since I started paying daily attention. One of them is currently due back on 28th November, and another one was due back on the 18th but they've now moved that forwards to the 16th, tomorrow, although it takes a good while to ramp up to full capacity. And a Torness reactor is due to come offline for refuelling tonight, with an aim to restart it in very early December.

UK wind was excellent in October and for several weeks until last weekend, but rather than try to describe that with words I recommend the graph at the bottom of this site, which shows the last week but can easily be adjusted to show the last month or the last year. It shows a lot more daily detail than the overall UK grid statistics sites we usually link to round here manage to show when looking at timeframes beyond the current day.

Winderful - Wind energy is currently producing 7,450 MW.

That's enough to power 37,437,186 PS5s!

winderful.uk

 

[elbows]

Oh and we can get clues about the wind generation expectations for the next 48 hours using sites like this one. Obviously we could just use weather forecasts to come up with a similar impression, but scrolling a fair way down this page to show the carbon intensity prediction in graph form is a handy way of gaining this view. There is regional data too but a lot of that picture is probably based on how the countries generation sources are wired to different regions as much as anything else.

Carbon Intensity

National Grid ESO have developed a Regional Carbon Intensity forecast for the GB electricity system.

www.carbonintensity.org.uk

On a related note, a global map of carbon intensity of electricity production, that varies over time, can be found here. I remain jealous of Norway.

Live 24/7 CO₂ emissions of electricity consumption

Electricity Maps is a live 24/7 visualization of where your electricity comes from and how much CO2 was emitted to produce it.

app.electricitymaps.com

 

[elbows]

Just in case I didnt spell out why Im paying attention to the French nuclear fleet on this thread about UK energy shortages...

Its because it has an impact on which direction our interconnectors to France are sending electricity. Because of the situation with their nuclear power stations we've been tending to send them up to 3GW of electricity, but if they were generating surplus power that situation could be reversed. And there are knock on consequences for some of our other interconnectors too, the French situation can affect the overall situation in much of Europe and people are watching closely to see how much progress they make with restarts as we head into winter.

 

[gentlegreen]

Does anyone have inside gen on this ?

Local council rationing hot water and heating as cost of living bites | JOE.co.uk

Local council rationing hot water and heating as cost of living bites

www.joe.co.uk

 

[elbows]

Update:

UK nuclear: A Torness reactor went off for refuelling as expected. One of the Heysham reactors that had been down for maintenance came back on as planned.

UK Gas: Still waiting for more details about a gas deal with the USA that was mentioned in the press about 10 days ago. Could be announced in the next week or two. eg UK to announce U.S. gas deal after climate change summit -Telegraph - ET EnergyWorld

France:

The two reactors that restarted recently have continued to ramp up their generation. One that restarted much earlier in November has been fluctuating a lot in its output in recent days. Another few restart dates got pushed back by some more days. Another one is due to go down for just a couple of days tonight.

The French grid operator has warned that they are now thinking that only 40GW of nuclear may be available by the start of next year, in contrast to EDFs plans which were for more like 48GW. And they have warned of a high risk of network strain as a result. A website is up and running which will provide advanced notice of any periods where they think supply wont meet demand, and will hope that consumers reduce their consumption over those periods.

News article about this: France faces high risk of power grid strain in January: operator

The site that will warn of shortages in France: Ecowatt | votre météo de l’électricité pour une consommation responsable

And just to put those GW values in some context, at the moment the maximum French nuclear capacity is around the 33GW level (and their entire fleet when running at max usually offers around 60GW). They've currently still got about 10-11GW additional scheduled to come back during the rest of November, and then about 4.5GW in December, but as per all my updates on this so far, the restart dates keep slipping and it doesnt sound like the French grid expect them to manage all of that on those timescales.

 

[elbows]

And a little bit more historical French GW supply and demand info:

Absolute peaks during certain winter moments in France in recent years have sometimes exceeded 80GW, even 85GW, with nuclear sometimes providing 50 or more GW of supply to help meet that demand.

 

[elbows]

France has now pushed back a bunch of November reactor restarts into December. Over 5GW of capacity that was originally scheduled to come back in November has now been pushed to December.

So far they are only about 2.5GW of nuclear better off right now than they were in early November when I started paying attention, but that number should rise quite a bit further by the end of the month so it isnt really the fairest moment to state that figure.

The current situation hasnt prevented the market price based system from functioning when it comes to import-export flows of electricity. For example there was a period of high UK electricity demand yesterday where the direction on the interconnectors between England and France was reversed. I've spoken before about how the typical picture of past years where France exported to the UK had tended to be reversed this year. But for that period of some hours yesterday, things flipped back to the old direction for some hours, France was sending us ~3GW instead of the other way around. Probably because our generation from wind had fallen dramatically, and there is a bit of variation in when our peak times of demand are compared to Frances (although still with some tricky overlap periods).

Since France uses a hell of a lot of electricity for heating, the situation is expected to get tighter as the weeks go by. EDF have had a bunch of successful reactor restarts but they need a whole lot more. The big unknowns in this equation arent just the weather, but also how much demand will actually be reduced due to the campaign to save energy, the high prices etc. They've got quite a lot of wind generation and hydroelectricity storage too, so the non-nuclear wiggle room varies quite a bit.

 

[cupid_stunt]

The government is finally going ahead with a campaign to get households to reduce their energy use by 15%, which funny enough is my own target to reduce my gas use, in addition to the 35% reduction the new boiler should provide, so a 50% reduction in total, having already reduced my electric use my over 50%, mainly due to a new fridge-freezer, plus using a air-fryer instead of the electric oven.

Brits set to be told how to save £420 on energy bills in government campaign

In a Tory U-turn, officials are drawing up tips including switching off radiators in empty rooms and taking showers instead of baths - as Chancellor Jeremy Hunt warns there'll be no more help after 2024

www.mirror.co.uk

 

[gentlegreen]

2024 - GE - IE potential Labour govt ???

I like that "420" is a sort of anagram of 2024 and also hints at what they've been smoking ...

 

[gentlegreen]

I don't own a shower, so I will stick to one 5kwh bath every month or so - usually triggered by the need to be close to other human beings...

 

[elbows]

The government is finally going ahead with a campaign to get households to reduce their energy use by 15%, which funny enough is my own target to reduce my gas use, in addition to the 35% reduction the new boiler should provide, so a 50% reduction in total, having already reduced my electric use my over 50%, mainly due to a new fridge-freezer, plus using a air-fryer instead of the electric oven.

Brits set to be told how to save £420 on energy bills in government campaign

In a Tory U-turn, officials are drawing up tips including switching off radiators in empty rooms and taking showers instead of baths - as Chancellor Jeremy Hunt warns there'll be no more help after 2024

www.mirror.co.uk

Yes one of the many advantages of getting rid of Truss was that she had already said some stupid stuff in this broad area (such as promising there would be no need for energy rationing this winter, a risky thing to promise although not completely impossible to imagine them getting away with this time). We might imagine that any attempts to reduce our energy use would have been labelled as one of the forces of the anti-growth coalition!

The 15% target by 2030 will likely have to be toughened up at some point before then, since even without the Putin etc angles, energy efficiency and cutting down on waste was likely to form a larger part of meeting our climate change and energy transition commitments than politicians have been willing to acknowledge so far.

Some forms of reporting on this still come under the banner of the Ukraine war, such as recent BBC reporting which favours the stop Putins blackmail angle in its headline. Its understandable for there to be a desire to frame it in this way for this current phase. And as we saw in the pandemic, the establishment in this country finds it easier to encourage national sacrifice, we're all in this together stuff when it can make use of 'war effort' type rhetoric. But I expect the broader theme wont go away even if Putin and war do.

Jeremy Hunt: Cut energy use to stop Putin 'blackmail'

People need to cut consumption to reduce the UK's reliance on Russia, the chancellor says.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[elbows]

A Bloomberg story about some of the most recent delays to Frances restart, includes a graph:

archive.ph

They also says the following and linked to another article which covered in advance the situation I mentioned the other day, where we switched for some hours to importing from France rather than exporting to them, due to a drop in wind:

The importance of France’s nuclear fleet was highlighted this week as the UK faced the first test of winter, with cold temperatures combining with low wind speeds during the evening peak of power demand. Imports from France to the UK surged Tuesday evening to help fill the gap.

The other article:

archive.ph

In the eight hours leading up to the 7-7.30 p.m. peak period, just about 500 megawatts of surplus capacity was set to be available above National Grid Plc’s demand forecast, making it likely the operator will pay more plants to switch on. Normally, on a tight winter day that margin would be about 2 gigawatts, according to industry consultancy Enappsys.

“This is the first tight day of the winter but it is not super tight,” said Phil Hewitt, director at Enappsys. “It is a small appetizer of tightness, there will be much tighter days ahead.”

It also mentioned that they would try the deman flexibility servive on that day, but I didnt look for other articles about that yet:

As demand peaks this evening, the grid will pay some homes to reduce consumption for the hour from 5.30 p.m. in a trial run of its new Demand Flexibility Service. Electricity for that period traded at £402/MWh on the Epex Spot SE exchange, more than double the price of the same time on Wednesday.

 

[elbows]

Found some more coverage of that event in advance of it happening:

Loss of Load Probability forecast to hit 99% putting the Demand Flexibility Service to the test

The Loss of Load Probability (LoLP) for Britain’s grid is set to hit 99% over settlement period 37 this evening (22 November).

www.current-news.co.uk

The Loss of Load Probability (LoLP) for Britain’s grid is set to hit 99% over settlement period 37 this evening (22 November).

The LoLP is a measure of the scarcity in available surplus generation capacity that National Grid ESO has at its disposal. Between 18:00 and 18:30 today, the Derated Margin is now predicted to hit -3.3GW.

This is all coinciding at the same time as the second test of the Demand Flexibility Service, which has currently procured ~140MW from 17:30-18:30 GMT.

If anyone here took part in that use of the demand flexibility service, you were doing your bit!

That article has given me yet another dashboard to follow:

Real time analytics for the GB energy market

LCP Enact is a data integration, analytics and forecasting platform for the GB energy market. Enact helps traders, analysts and managers navigate an increasingly competitive market with ease, make better decisions, and monitor performance

enact.lcp.energy

And another article from the day before, in regards that 2nd use of the Demand Flexibility Service:

National Grid ESO reveals second Demand Flexibility Test period

National Grid ESO has revealed the next Demand Flexibility Test scheduled for 22 November between 17:30 and 18:30.

www.current-news.co.uk

This is set to be the second trial for the ESO’s demand flexibility service with the first test having been performed on 15 November between 17:00 and 18:00. Much like the first test, the second calls for a flexibility requirement of 200MW.

Includes some info from Octopus in regards what was saved during the first test period:

Octopus Energy launched its own flexibility service dubbed Saving Sessions which provides customers with a financial incentive for turning down energy consumption amid these test periods. The first session saw 200,000 households reduce their electricity use, with the average household lowering its demand by over half (59%).

In doing so, more than 108MW in flexibility was provided to the energy grid.

 

[elbows]

And a later report on what Octopus touted was saved in the second test period:

Octopus Energy’s second ‘Saving Sessions’ trial sees energy demand reduced by 112MW

Octopus Energy has confirmed its second “Saving Sessions” trial saw customers reduce their energy demand by a collective 112MW.

www.current-news.co.uk

Octopus Energy has confirmed its second “Saving Sessions” trial saw customers reduce their energy demand by a collective 112MW.

This figure is higher than the energy reduced in the first trial on 15 November which saw a collective 108MW of grid flexibility provided, the company said.

Octopus Energy has stated that the second “Saving Sessions” flexibility scheme retained 94% of its participants from the first trial with the top 5% saving an average of £9 across the two sessions. On average households received over £1 for the energy they shift out for the duration of the scheme period.

 

[elbows]

A list of providers that signed up for the Demand Flexibility Service can be found here:

Approved Providers List | National Grid ESO

www.nationalgrideso.com

 

[elbows]

This time I have managed to notice indicators before the event, rather than only talking about it afterwards.

When I post stuff like this please dont treat it as a prediction of woe, just as one indicator of a period where the supply-demand balance is predicted to be tight. And the purpose of these sorts of systems is to generate a response via market forces etc which will normally then trigger generation and imports that avoid supply falling below demand.

It will be a good moment to reduce your power use during that timeframe though, if convenient and you are up for it etc.

I havent yet looked at whether another Demand Flexibility Service period will be scheduled as part of the response to this forecast:

 

[Storm Fox]

This time I have managed to notice indicators before the event, rather than only talking about it afterwards.

When I post stuff like this please dont treat it as a prediction of woe, just as one indicator of a period where the supply-demand balance is predicted to be tight. And the purpose of these sorts of systems is to generate a response via market forces etc which will normally then trigger generation and imports that avoid supply falling below demand.

It will be a good moment to reduce your power use during that timeframe though, if convenient and you are up for it etc.

I havent yet looked at whether another Demand Flexibility Service period will be scheduled as part of the response to this forecast:

The grid frequency is falling at the moment.

From G. B. National Grid status

 

[platinumsage]

The grid frequency is falling at the moment.
View attachment 353109
From G. B. National Grid status

The expected margin in normal operation is ±0.2, so nothing to see there, and it's back up now anyway:

Extranet

extranet.nationalgrid.com

 

[elbows]

The grid frequency is falling at the moment.
View attachment 353109
From G. B. National Grid status

Normal for it to fluctuate a bit though, although if it became more extreme it would be an indicator of trouble.

The graphs on this site are useful for putting the current levels into a range of broader contexts:

Power Grid Frequency

GB Grid Frequency

gridwatch.co.uk

 

[elbows]

And just to be clear, the period where supply and demand balance is forecast to be tight, that I mentioned earlier, is for tomorrow not today. I wouldnt generally look to weekends for trouble unless the trouble was caused by various notable failures rather than especially high demand.

 

[Storm Fox]

And just to be clear, the period where supply and demand balance is forecast to be tight, that I mentioned earlier, is for tomorrow not today. I wouldnt generally look to weekends for trouble unless the trouble was caused by various notable failures rather than especially high demand.

Thanks. I have looked before and it seemed pretty spot on to 50Hz. Yay confirmation bias (on my part).

 

[elbows]

It looks like one of the reactors at Heysham 2, which was originally due to restart on 28th November but then got its restart brought forward to the 26th, did not have a successful restart. Its power output increased for a little over 12 hours on the 26th but then went back down to zero. It looks like they have scheduled another restart attempt for December 3rd.

Meanwhile a Harlepool reactor went offline on the 26th for refuelling, and is planned to come back on December 10th.

 

[elbows]

The insulation scheme mentioned in this story doesnt start till after this winter is over, but also mentioned is:

A new £18m public information campaign will also offer advice on how to reduce energy use in the home, "without sacrificing comfort", BEIS said. The advice will include turning down boiler temperatures and radiators to save energy.

Insulation: £1bn funding for least efficient homes

Government announces extra funding to help those in least efficient homes in lower council tax bands.

www.bbc.co.uk

That follows speculation a few days earlier:

Energy advice: Sunak to expand tips campaign to lower bills

His government aims to curb energy use in a move once seen as "nannying" by former PM Liz Truss.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[gentlegreen]

I can't find it in my YouTube history, but bloody hell Germany !
Lignite FFS
And "Atomkraft Kein Danke" ...
And importing coal as well as gas from Russia.
The only mitigation compared to us is better insulated homes - versus continental winters ...