LONDON:The risk of blackouts in Britain this winter is rising as spare capacity in the electricity markets has fallen to its lowest level in a decade, National Grid has warned.
Generating capacity will exceed demand at peak periods by only 1.2 per cent this winter. It means supplies are the tightest they have been in around a decade.
National Grid is putting contingency measures in place to ensure the lights stay on, paying generators such as Centrica and SSE £36m to keep power plants that would otherwise be mothballed on standby, and asking industrial users such as Tata Steel to be ready to switch off during times of peak demand.
This will ensure a safety buffer of about 5 per cent of capacity is available, but will also add about 50p to every household’s bill this year.
Cordi O’Hara, National Grid’s director of market operation, said: “It’s clear that electricity margins for that coldest, darkest half hour of winter are currently tighter than they have been, due to power station closures.”
But ageing power plants and moves to phase out coal-powered stations in favour of “cleaner” sources of energy has meant that the capacity crunch Britain is now experiencing has been predicted for at least 10 years.
So how has the nation come to find itself in this vulnerable position, and can we actually expect the situation to improve any time soon?
This year, the closure of power stations such as SSE’s Ferrybridge in Yorkshire and E.on’s Ironbridge in Shropshire is taking out another 2GW of capacity. Expectations a decade ago that energy giants would turn to low-carbon power sources – from new nuclear plants to alternative energies such as solar and wind – were thrown off course by the financial crisis and successive governments switching policies and targets.
The Government is now banking on a new array of gas-fired plants to solve supply needs in the longer term, while more and more electricity is also set to be imported from the continent – frequently generated from dirty coal plants.
