By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
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Britain remains “critically vulnerable” to future energy crises, experts have warned.
The country’s high dependency on gas for heating and electricity generation has left us more exposed than other European countries to swings in market prices, according to a commission set up by Energy UK, Citizens Advice and the Confederation of British Industry.
The report was published hours after a backstop system designed to prevent blackouts was mobilised for the first time in two years as Britain’s power grid battled low winds and nuclear outages.
The surprise notice for the capacity market, which sends a warning to Britain’s electricity generators, was issued by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) just after midday on Monday.
It told generators to be ready to bring online back-up systems for when demand spikes at 4:30pm amid fears the amount of spare power capacity had grown unacceptably small compared to demand.
However, the notice was later withdrawn just after 2pm.
Tuesday’s report from the Energy Crisis Commission found that Britain was “dangerously underprepared” for the 2021 and 2022 energy crisis, when the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up the price of gas.
At one point, before a massive £150bn intervention was pledged by the Government, a typical household could have seen its annual bill rise from around £2,000 per year to £3,500 per year.
In the event, costs were capped at £2,500 per year. But even this had “catastrophic” consequences for poorer households, the commission found, with nine in 10 households cutting back their energy use and 7.5m falling into fuel poverty.
At the same time, one in 10 businesses were forced to temporarily cease operations to shield themselves from the eye-watering cost of energy.
The commission found the impact of price rises could have been cushioned if more homes were properly insulated and the UK had more gas storage capacity.
They also said the Government spent more money than it needed to because of poorly designed support schemes and a lack of investment over many years in infrastructure such as gas storage.
In a report, the commission said: “Keeping bills down for everyone over the coming years and decades means reducing our dependence on gas and its volatile pricing; increasing the production and distribution of clean homegrown power; and making more of our homes and businesses energy efficient.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/14/blackout-prevention-plan-activated-britain/
Quite why Citizens Advice have co-wrote this report is beyond me.
And none of them seem to have realised the contradiction of calling for more renewable energy, when it was the intermittency of wind power which triggered the blackout warning earlier this week.
They recommend more insulation, but have not bothered to do a cost/benefit analysis to see whether it would actually be worth it. Nor have they said who should pay for it.
By far the biggest factor behind our high dependency on gas is the forced shutdown of all of our coal power capacity. It is still not too late to build a new fleet of ultra clean coal power plants, just as Germany has been doing. It is worth noting that in Germany coal accounts for 16% of primary energy consumption – here it is just 3%. Conversely gas makes up 33% of our total energy, compared to 24% in Germany.
They call for more gas storage, which seems illogical when Net Zero will shut gas down anyway. In any event the value of the Rough storage facility has always been overstated; at a capacity of 100 bcf, it would only hold enough to supply demand for about 16 days. It would have made no difference at all to gas prices in 2021/22.
Finally it should be pointed out that even during 2022, when gas prices spiked, we were still paying out CfD subsidies to renewables. In other words renewable energy was still more expensive than gas power.
In any event, you don’t plan your energy policy around the off chance that there might be a war somewhere in the world, sometime in the future.
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https://dp.lowcarboncontracts.uk/dataset/actual-cfd-generation-and-avoided-ghg-emissions
Gas prices may be volatile, but renewables will leave us with permanently higher prices.
FOOTNOTE
At least Jim Watson admits that bills will rise if we invest in more renewables:
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