2015/16: The lights really did go out

So the doom-mongers were right: the lights really did go out this winter.

When National Grid published its annual Winter Outlook last October, and again when it entered the market for ‘emergency measures’ in November, Fleet Street’s headline writers were warning of ‘Blackout fears’ (Daily Mirror), ‘Britain may run out of electricity’ (Daily Star), Britain’s ‘High-wire act’ (Financial Times) and ‘Increased blackout risk’ (Daily Telegraph).

And how accurate their prognostications turned out to be.

In early December, the lights went out for around 55,000 homes around Lancaster and Morecambe and a few thousand more in Cumbria. Utility companies ‘battled’ to maintain supplies, but the lights stayed out for about 36 hours. Not just factories but the Royal Lancaster Infirmary were forced to take emergency measures.

Over Christmas, the lights went out for an estimated 37,000 people in Yorkshire.

At the end of December, it was the turn of at least 7,000 households in northern Scotland, including the Inner Hebrides, and Enniskillen and Coleraine in Northern Ireland.

And just last weekend, the lights went out for a massive 100,000 homes in London and across the South-East of England.

If anything, the media has downplayed the blackout risk. Britons suffer about a quarter of a million power cuts every year. How we retain our status as the world’s fifth biggest economy is a mystery.

And what’s even more remarkable is that some of these blackouts can be linked to ‘green crap’ policies.

Twin shrieks

There are two competing power-cut stories in modern Britain – one real, the other largely fictional.

In the real world, Britons experience power cuts every day. A worker cuts through a cable in the street; a relay fails; a substation gets flooded; a power line comes down in heavy wind. Impacts range from the mild inconvenience of a spoiled supper to the cancellation of a hospital operation.

Meanwhile, the national narrative is all about the risk of outages caused by a lack of generating capacity – something on which, as we showed in a recent report, mainstream media has published nearly 500 articles over the last decade.

In all this time, there has been just one generation-related outage – and that when two power stations failed for unrelated reasons within five minutes of each other. The impact was far less than nationwide, and the power was off for about 20 minutes on average – far shorter than the good burghers of Lancaster faced back in December. It was no more of a ‘blackout’ than a slow puncture is a blowout.

From which one might reasonably conclude that:

1. National Grid does a pretty good job of keeping the lights on
2. current trends in the electricity sector – falling demand, increasing volumes of renewable generation plus imports down interconnecting cables – have so far proven sufficient compensation for the closures of old power stations, notably the ageing nuclear and coal fleets
3. generation-related outages, should they happen, would last for far shorter periods than the 36 hours faced by people in Lancaster in December
4. warnings of generation-related 'blackouts' in modern Britain have proved as unfounded as those of the Millennium Bug.

Long, hot summer mights

We may though be in for another summer of such stories given that five of the UK’s big coal-fired power stations – Eggborough, Ferrybridge, Fiddler’s Ferry, Longannet and Rugeley – recently announced their impending closure.

But already this story is a little more complex than it might seem, and illustrates the tools National Grid has at its disposal to ensure generation-related outages don’t happen.

While Longannet and Ferrybridge have indeed closed, units at Fiddler’s Ferry and Eggborough will remain available for back-up power in the coming winter and, in all probability, beyond. This is a smart solution in the short-term; a lot less coal will be burned, so reducing emissions of air pollutants and carbon dioxide, but the units are there to provide power to the grid if it’s needed.

Even with these contracts secured, and the imminent scheduled opening of the new Carrington gas-fired power station near Manchester, the margin between projected peak demand and maximum available supply is going to be tighter than in recent times.

This led former RWE npower boss Paul Massara to declare on Wednesday that the next four winters carry a higher-than-average risk warning – not that he believes we will actually see power cuts, despite a Times headline that is a classic of the genre.

‘Green crap’ pros and cons

Despite what some headlines tell you, adding more and more renewable generation to Britain’s electricity mix isn’t leading to more power cuts. Danish and German households source a higher proportion of their electricity from renewables than their British counterparts, but experience a lower risk of power cuts than Britain.