By Paul Homewood
As part of their Clean Power 2030 report, NESO did some modelling of what generation might look like in 2030.
It covered a 7-day period in each season, based on increased renewable capacity and higher demand:
https://www.neso.energy/document/346781/download
The virtual disappearance of weather-dependent power for days in winter should scare everybody.
The only way NESO could square the circle was to fill that gap with unabated gas. Their database shows that we would need as much as 27 GW of gas power, an amount that we could not even cobble together last week when we were close to blackouts.
Even then we would still need nearly 7 GW of flexibility, of which battery storage would be able to supply at most 2 GW for a short time. The rest would come from Demand Supply Response.
NESO naively believe that the public will willingly stop using electricity for hours at a time when the wind stops blowing. The reality is that rolling blackouts will be inevitable- enforced demand reduction, you might say!
Overall NESO are banking on 11.7 GW of DSR in 2030, but 5.4 GW of this is smart charging of EVs and V2G. In other words, they are hoping drivers charge up at night, switching demand away from peak time.
However, as they state in their assumptions, charging at off peak is already built into their peak demand models. If it was not, peak demand would be even higher than the 62 GW they forecast, so it cannot be counted twice.
In reality all they have is 4.7 GW of DSR for Residential and Industry, on top of what is already there now.
Surprisingly even in Spring there will be massive shortfalls of power, with up to 19 GW of gas power required and 12 GW of Flex.
NESO’s numbers simply do not stack up.
And it all begs the question of what happens when those gas plants start shutting down, whether by design or old age.