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UK gas/electricity supply shortages this winter

Turns out there have been a bunch of different issues with various interconnectors with France this month, reducing available capacity between the countries.

Our already crappy nuclear capacity is also reduced at the moment due to a bunch of reactors offline for refuelling and one off for maintenance.

This post isnt supposed to be a doom warning though, just nerdy detail, detail I would shout a bit louder if we were deep into a cold winter at the time of the issues.
 
Just to update on my previous post:

One of the interconnectors, IFA with France got 500MW back compared to its recent reduction (the one damaged by fire a long time ago, now running at 1.5GW instead of full 2GW, was down to 1GW for a time recently).

But IFA2 interconnector with France is still down. Suspected cable fault, with a return date currently pencilled into the system of Feb 1st 2024. Thats 1GW lost. I dont think I've seen any media reports about this. I wouldnt necessarily expect any general media reports about this because they arent running a broader story of electricity woes at the moment that this would feed into, but I havent seen it mentioned in speciality publications yet either. So I just have the barest of info via the REMIT system.

We've got about 1GW of nuclear generation back since my previous post.
 
Another Demand Flexibility Service period on Wednesday:

www.bbc.co.uk

Discounts return to cut electricity use amid cold snap

National Grid ESO's scheme offers some households a chance to save on energy bills during peak hours.
www.bbc.co.uk

National Grid ESO said it decided to offer discounts in return for people reducing their electricity consumption after its forecasts showed tighter than usual supply margins on Wednesday evening.
"These are precautionary measures to maintain the buffer of spare capacity we need," the network operator said.

The so-called Demand Flexibility Service enables households to save cash if they avoid high-power activities, such as cooking or using washing machines, for a specified period when demand is high.

The cold weather and a lack of wind is expected to contribute to higher power demand, but National Grid ESO said deploying the scheme was based on a "combination of factors".
Click to expand...
 
I am no longer posting here every time there is a Demand Flexibility Service period announced. I think I've missed a few already this month.

Meanwhile the new 'Viking Link' interconnector with Denmark has started to show some inward flows to the UK in recent days. I dont think its due to be officially commissioned will around the 29th December but they are obviously trying it already. Sounds like they cant use it at full rated capacity for quite a while though due to unfinished grid projects in a region of Denmark. All the same, they can still get 800MW out of it.
 
A few thoughts and an early preview in regards the coming winter:

No more generation from coal as a backup during the tightest moments.

French nuclear situation remains vastly better than it was two years ago.

I am not aware of any major concerns in regards gas supply, which was the other major factor in ramping up concerns several years ago.

Currently not much in the way of unplanned UK nuclear outages compared to what was seen on some occasions in recent years.

I havent looked for forecasts for the coming winter yet. I will do a followup post when I do.

Some changes to the Demand Flexibility Service have been proposed for this year, but I havent found out whether the regulator has accepted them yet. I expect we will hear a bit about this in the months to come.

If there are any problems this winter, it will likely be down to the usual combination of unfavourable weather conditions (eg ones that reduce wind generation and increase demand) and unplanned generation or transmission outages coinciding with that.

Interconnectors are increasingly important, and right now there are a whole bunch of significant outages. It is lucky that these have happened at this time of year rather than in several months time. At the moment the link to Norway is down, two links to France are down and the biggest link to France is only operating at half capacity. Combined, I believe this amounts to over 4GW of potential missing supply. I need to check the latest estimates of when these will come back into service. Most of the interconnectors, when operating, tend to spend most of their time importing electricity into the UK as opposed to exporting it. This matters to the grid as a whole, but especially to meeting the demands of London and the South.
 
When poking around to bring myself up-to-date, I noticed that a Electricity Capacity Market Notice was issued on 14th October for the first time in nearly 2 years. These are issued when the expected margin between supply and demand falls to a dangerously low level. As is quite typical with these things, that notice was cancelled later, often as a result of the market having responded accordingly, resulting in a change the supply and/or demand prediction for the period in question.

I have not been able to ascertain all of the reasons why this situation arose, as its usual a combination of factors and I cannot monitor all of them, but it is likely that the sudden loss of the Norway interconnector was a big part of it. Especially as the timing of the start of that loss matches rather well, and it would have taken a bit of time for the planners to get alternative sources inserted into that days balancing plans, and issuing that sort of market capacity notice is one way to get that sort of response quickly.

Meanwhile I also note that one big reform of the system went ahead, the plans for a 'Future System Operator' came to fruition. National Grids Electricity System Operator (ESO) department was sold to the state for £630 million. Now we have a new publicly owned body called the National Energy System Operator (NESO) which is responsible for that part of the system, and also for similar stuff when it comes to the likes of gas. This formally happened on October 1st, so it was NESO that was responsible for issuing the aforementioned Electricity Capacity Market Notice.

I wont attempt to quote any of the waffle about NESO right now, but to give some sense of what sort of things its predecessor was responsible for, this is what Ofgem said about the old ESO:

The Electricity System Operator (ESO) performs several important functions; from second-by-second balancing of electricity supply and demand, to developing markets and advising on network investments. The ESO has an important role to play in the UK’s transition to a decarbonised, decentralised and digitalised energy system.
Click to expand...
 
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gentlegreen said:
A nutter on PT posted a loony prepper video that I didn't watch that referenced an inaccessible Torygraph "article"

Seems to be a pro-coal thing ...

www.telegraph.co.uk

Britain ‘critically vulnerable’ to energy crisis

Experts warn over gas dependency after blackout prevent system mobilised for first time in two years
www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk

energycrisiscommission.uk

Energy Crisis Commission

[email protected]
energycrisiscommission.uk energycrisiscommission.uk
Click to expand...

Ah, I havent had access to that Telegraph article myself either, so I dont know what spin they put on it, but it probably refers to the 14th October Electricity Capacity Market Notice that I just mentioned in my previous post.
 
Some nuclear industry association also took the opportunity to put out a press release moaning about the loss of our old nuclear power stations, and the next few scheduled closures in the coming years. Opportunism in the face of that Electricity Capacity Market Notice, calling for more investment in nuclear.

The reality is that even if we press ahead with all the nuclear plans and ambitions that have already been announced, get them all fiunded and do as much as possible to deliver them at fast pace, nuclear projects take absolutely ages, and have a very long history of suffering numerous delays. So they arent going to help with any system shortfalls that we may have in the next 5-6 years, maybe much longer. And Im being generous with that timescale by including Hinckley Point C, which is already long past the funding stage. The only other nuclear stuff that will help in that timeframe is if some of the remaining plants get further life extensions beyond their current closure dates. Our current nuclear generation capacity has dwindled to the extent that when all the interconnectors are working, we get nearly as much electricity from Frances nuclear fleet as we do our own!
 
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Since I went on about them the other day, I suppose I better report on updates to the status of the interconnectors I mentioned.

In the last day or so the interconnector with Norway was restored (1.4GW), and the largest interconnector with France is now back to full capacity (2GW instead of 1GW).

The other two interconnectors with France, which have about 1GW capacity each, are not currently due back till mid November. One of these runs through the channel tunnel!
 
elbows said:
Since I went on about them the other day, I suppose I better report on updates to the status of the interconnectors I mentioned.

In the last day or so the interconnector with Norway was restored (1.4GW), and the largest interconnector with France is now back to full capacity (2GW instead of 1GW).

The other two interconnectors with France, which have about 1GW capacity each, are not currently due back till mid November. One of these runs through the channel tunnel!
Click to expand...
I may as well update this picture.

One of the faulty French interconnectors came back in November as hoped. The other one, which runs through the channel tunnel, has had its outage extended several times and its now not due back till February.

Earlier this month the interconnector between the UK and the Netherlands developed an onshore cable fault and is currently not scheduled to return till the end of January. This is another of the ~1GW capacity ones.

So we are still about 2GW down on maximum interconnector capacity. On its own this doesnt cause a complete nightmare, it will just be if other circumstances occur where we need the wiggle room in winter that this adds to the problem. Its our first winter without wiggle room from backup coal generation too, but I am not presently predicting a problem because I couldnt do that unless weather and other unplanned outages create a sticky situation.

Meanwhile Frances brand new nuclear reactor, Flamanville 3, which suffered a 12-13 year delay in becoming ready and is of the same type as being built at Hinkley Point (albeit Hinkley gets 2 of these reactors), is finally scheduled to come online in the system proper tomorrow. But they will be running it at various test loads till next summer so it wont be instantly adding 1675MW to their system. Their system is in better shape than last winter and vastly better shape than the winter before that, with at least 8-9GW more nuclear supply available this time around than was the case at the peak of winter 2022-23. I monitor this in a UK context because of the interconnectors and Frances available spare capacity which can be exported to a number of countries.
 
Meanwhile the Demand Flexibility Service has evolved and is now a year-round thing. I believe this involves some new commercial and market mechanisms and contracts, and some suppliers can probably use it to offer cheaper (or even free) electricity during periods where available renewable etc supply is outstripping demand.

But one consequence of it no longer being only a winter wiggle room thing is that I dont think its being promoted in the mainstream press in the same way we saw happen in the previous two winters. So I dont have a handy article to point to, and I havent seen whether the electricity companies have been promoting such schemes to consumers much this time around.

Also in terms of the big picture and household consumers, I believe there is a plan to make the 'metered per half hour period' thing that large business consumers have long enjoyed a part of the broader household consumer system within a few years, and when blended with smart meters we will start to see more of the flexible, 'smart', variably priced system come to fruition. There are also plans to offer people the choice of an energy deal that doesnt have a standing change, although whether thats a better deal for you will depend on your level of consumption since you'll pay more per unit instead. The classic type of deal that has a standing charge will still be available, so it will be another choice to make.

Returning to this winter, another reason we are hearing less in the press this time is that the National Energy System Operators winter forecast decided there is more wiggle room than last winter:

NESO’s Winter Outlook Report for 2024/2025 shows sufficient available capacity to meet electricity demand in winter 2024/2025 with a derated margin of 5.2GW (8.8%) of the average peak cold spell demand for this winter and a LOLE of below 0.1 hours/year. This is an increase from 4.4GW (7.4% of peak demand) last winter.
Click to expand...
(that quote is from Statutory Security of Supply Report 2024. )

Although I suspect that calculation wont have taken into account the remaining interconnector issues I just mentioned, so perhaps the situation isnt actually more comfortable than last winter, and in any case the weather has yet to have its important say in the picture.

Obviously the gas situation of two winters ago is not the same these days either (UK gas distribution system being used to export more to continental Europe to compensate for their Ukraine-Russia related shortfalls), which was the other reason press attention was high two years ago and threads like this one came into being.
 
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elbows said:
Things got too tight for comfort when they were predicting the supply-demand balance for a period on Wednesday, so they ended up issuing an electricity margin notice. As usual, this mechanism appeared to serve its purpose and they eventually got the predicted margins they needed, allowing them to cancel the notice.

Click to expand...

We are in a classic winter lull at the moment. High pressure over the country and the North Sea ( which is why it’s so cold and the nights are lovely and clear) This means there isn’t much wind over the big off shore arrays and there is a lot of demand for both electricity and gas. It’s the kind of conditions that ( partially) the Capacity Market was designed to mitigate for. Looks like Uniper *made a lot of money by spinning up two CCGTs but we weren’t any where near close to a CM stress event.

Mind you if we haven’t got more CCGTs before the old nukes finally get shut down who knows….

* Two power station owners to get more than £12m for three hours of electricity
 
kalmatthew said:
A freind sent me a link thay explained this in a lot of fairly nerdy detail here it's similar to some of the things elbows has posted on the thread but sill worth a read.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the very good article. It covers a lot of stuff very well, although I'm probably in the luxurious position of being able to vaguely pick at one or two areas it didnt cover completely.

On the demand control side of things, it leapt straight to the major regional disconnection scenario, where a rota is used to cut off different regions in blocks of a few hours at a time. But I was under the impression that there is also a form of demand control which would come first, where large customers, under specific contracts, can be disconnected. However I am very far from being an expert about that and since I lack obviousl examples of this being used, I dont know exactly how much of an option it was on this occasion or how much demand it would have reduced.

On the supply side of things, it was good to see interconnectors get some mention, in this case that they were able to dodge a planned 700MW Viking (Denmark) interconnector maintenance loss during the tight period. What was missing from the interconnector picture was the broader story I'd been telling in this thread recently, that one of the interconnectors with France is down (the channel tunnel one) as is the interconnector with the Netherlands. These are down for physical reasons that no market intervention or instruction can overcome. It also seems that since I last reported on the state of interconnectors here, theres also been an outage thats affecting a quarter of the biggest interconnector with France, since about December 30th it has only been able to deliver 1500MW max instead of 2000MW.
 
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A380 said:
We are in a classic winter lull at the moment. High pressure over the country and the North Sea ( which is why it’s so cold and the nights are lovely and clear) This means there isn’t much wind over the big off shore arrays and there is a lot of demand for both electricity and gas. It’s the kind of conditions that ( partially) the Capacity Market was designed to mitigate for. Looks like Uniper *made a lot of money by spinning up two CCGTs but we weren’t any where near close to a CM stress event.

Mind you if we haven’t got more CCGTs before the old nukes finally get shut down who knows….

* Two power station owners to get more than £12m for three hours of electricity
Click to expand...
Yes, although the wind lull has been a bit more varaible than that, it recovered a fair after the tight period in question on Wednesday, although its now heading back down again, hence the aforementioned article mentioning that Friday will be tight again.

I often use the following site to study generation by type for various periods in time. Its not perfect since there are some forms of embedded generation that arent metered ina way that shows up in this data, but its still pretty good for telling all sorts of stories. So here for example we can see the very tight period on Werdnesday 8th Jan showing up pretty clearly, given that wind generation is shown in dark blue on this chart:


Screenshot 2025-01-10 at 00.41.33.png

I can also use the same source to add to the picture when it comes to the other stuff you mention, and in a little bit I will use the available filter on the graph, and the data stretching back to 2016, to tell a simplistic story about gas, nuclear, the interconnectors and wind.

Here is a screenshot of the filter that also acts as a key for what the other colours mean.

Screenshot 2025-01-10 at 01.13.50.png
 
So, a brief simplified picture of nuclear which Im going to combine with the interconnector picture.

All the first gen Magnox reactors were shut before the 'generation by fuel type' data Im using began in 2016. A few of the Advanced Gas Cooled reactors have been permanently shut down during the period covered by this data, but others have had their shutdown dates postponed. Those and Sizewell B (a different type still, that is scheduled to keep going for longer) are all we've got left, and I make no assumptions about when the first brand new reactor (Hinkley Point C) will actually enter service.

Anyway when I play with the filters on the graph, broadly speaking the decline in available nuclear generation since 2016 (in green below) has so far been compensated for by the increase in imports via new interconnectors with various countries (all the other colours below). And this is certainly one of the reasons I go on about the interconnectors so much, we are increasingly reliant on them.

Screenshot 2025-01-10 at 01.29.24.png

And a smaller version of nuclear only, just so you can see that decline on its own:

Screenshot 2025-01-10 at 01.32.08.png
 
I can also do the same sort of thing with some other important sources of electricity generation. Just have to keep in mind what I said previously, that there is some embedded generation missing from this picture, ie solar and I believe also some relevant fraction of our wind generation.

Gas and coal on their own, showing an obvious declining trend over the period as a whole:

Screenshot 2025-01-10 at 01.36.18.png

But then add in wind and biomass and something a fair bit more stable emerges (skating over some particular individual seasons declines that may say more about demand than theoretical maximum supply capacity):

Screenshot 2025-01-10 at 01.36.41.png
 
elbows said:
On the demand control side of things, it leapt straight to the major regional disconnection scenario, where a rota is used to cut off different regions in blocks of a few hours at a time. But I was under the impression that there is also a form of demand control which would come first, where large customers, under specific contracts, can be disconnected. However I am very far from being an expert about that and since I lack obviousl examples of this being used, I dont know exactly how much of an option it was on this occasion or how much demand it would have reduced.
Click to expand...
That was my understanding as well large factories and other industrial users being cut first before you got to domestic and light business.
 
The BBC article featuring government reassurances does make reference to Centricas agenda, although so far it doesnt explicitly point out that they have used the current storage levels story as part of their campaign of pressure.

www.bbc.co.uk

UK has enough gas, says No.10 after supply warning

British Gas-owner Centrica says that storage levels in the UK are "concerningly low".
www.bbc.co.uk

As for those government reassurances, it all comes to the weather and other factors affecting amount of wiggle room. Like the rest of the stuff in this thread, most of the time the bullets will be dodged, but the reduced wiggle room really should be used as an impetus to make major changes over time in order to reduce the chances that the shit will ever hit the fan.
 
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