Energy news in general

Chrysalis

matt_drummer said:

Chrysalis said:

They are reporting an industry problem  These things need exposing to remind the government and others we are still in a energy crisis, we have serious issues right now.  The article made no claims about profit that I can see.

The headline says that two power station owners are to get £12m for three hours electricity.

What does this mean, it's a lot, or not enough? How much is three hours electricity, it's not a measurement I am familiar with?

The headline is designed to make it sound like two gas power station owners will make a fortune for just three hours work and that we are all being ripped off.

Perhaps the article would have been fairer if it did mention the profit and how that is arrived at.

The headline obviously worked as you said things like this need exposing. All they have exposed is that two power stations got paid to generate electricity at short notice.

The article states we paid well over normal market rate for the emergency supply, what part of that is inaccurate?  There was no part of the article that said it is all profit.

I have no bias towards the industry or feel any need to defend it, problems are problems.

Chrysalis

QrizB said:

One of the Green & Ethical board regulars shared this link over there. It's to an article about yesterday's electricity supply squeeze.
https://watt-logic.com/2025/01/09/blackouts-near-miss-in-tighest-day-in-gb-electricity-market-since-2011/
I can't vouch for its acuracy, but am sharing for interest value.

Very informative article, thank you.

Will check back on this site after today which seems to be another expected problem day.
I kind of feel like "losing the lights" as Scot puts it needs to happen, as it would no doubt cause more corrective action.  Kind of like how being homeless can net you better long term security vs being close to becoming homeless.

Chrysalis

Scot_39 said:

stripling said:

@Scot_39
Wind power has generated even less in recent past in deep winter  - like this time last year it dropped to half yesterdays minimum half hourly ave of 3.0 GW  - one freezing cold winters afternoon.  To about 5% cf yesterdays c10% lows of the now c30GW plus installed theoretical capacity.
So last January we spun up all 4 four 500MW coal units at Ratcliffe - to generate upto 2GW - similar to yesterdays predicted shortfall - now closed.  Just part of the UKs secure generation capacity that has in recent years been permanently decommissioned - but not replaced by reliable generation alternatives.
The peaks on renewables save our emissions - the inconvenient for policy makers truth - is the troughs threaten our energy security - if not our own home lights - the heavy industrial users production capacity.

Actually, the cost of the two gas power stations fired up for 3 hours was relatively minor if you zoom out and look at the entire system. There were a lot of scaremongering ill-informed headlines but the gas stations were bought in as back-up not as a desperate quick fix or the lights were going out. NESO could've drawn on the Battery Energy Storage Systems (Bess) for what are called 'peakers' for at least some of this back up but lo and behold our privatised energy system means that the grid batteries made even more $$s by selling their power on markets elsewhere....  Inter-connectors, that sell energy between countries, go out of the UK as well as in. Yep, it's a dog eat dog, high speed, constantly flashing, trans-national energy market and the British end of it is the most broken of all of it. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Because we have 'marginal pricing' where electricity prices are linked to gas - we are suffering from really dirty (as opposed to the previous more 'usual') games of (mostly) American hedge funds on the Dutch TTF markets (the wholesale market). These folks moved in on the game after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The roller coaster high prices then get spun as a problem of 'dunkelflautes' or 'geopolitical stress' or wait for it, drum roll ....Ukraine transits, or the lack of them, all of which is spin, leading to one analyst I talk to coining the expression 'You've been Bloomberged'...
(I won't tell you what he said about the repeated use of the Ukraine transit story because this is a polite forum ..). 😁

What does this mean? It means the consumer (particularly in Britain) suffers from extreme energy prices largely caused by a combination of fossil fuel companies naughty PR games and Hedge funds talking up prices to boost their coffers.  Donald Tusk even wrote a paper recently arguing for European market regulation because of it. 

Renewables are not much of a problem - broken energy markets, lack of regulation and certain 'vested interests' are the real problems.

WE may not have lost the lights - we may have conventional capacity still - but we were still reliant on GW on interconnects yesterday during evening peak.

But yet still selling c0.8GW to Ireland.

That's not energy security.

If a cable or conversion station fails - remember the price spikes when the fire occurred on the French 2GW link station in UK - what sort of energy security is that.

The interconnects go both ways - so if EU prices are higher - UK generated power gets sold to them - so we have to match it to.

You can blame speculators - but no one would be able to speculate - if the conditions weren't right for them to do so.

And in the UK - sorry IMO our exposure is largely due to our reliance on unreliable wind to move to net zero.

It's not the only solution and now its such a large share - it's variability - not just in UK - but through interconnects - large swathes of N Europe - also now impact us.

Supposedly 30.3GW installed theoretical capacity last figure I saw - which we could get just c5% out of in last years example - or just 10% yesterday - when needed power at peak winter demand - around 45GW yeasterday only 3GW wind power.

Imagine if your gas boiler only gave you 2-3 kW of power to heat your home and HW yesterday rather than say its normal 20-30kW rated power.  And you had to go and run 18 kW of electric plug in's instead to make up the shortfall.

Thats the reality of winds lows.

Replacing GWs of conventional coal and nuclear - shut often long after design lifetimes - without building any of our own core generation replacements - for like 3-4 decades- has gotten UK into this mess.

In 2000s alone we have shut down 6.6GW of nuclear and GW more of coal - the last 2GW of which that we did have - and we had need of last Jan - at Ratcliff - now gone too.

More than enough to have avoided any need for interconnects - and so exposure to wider EU market speculation - or their energy policy decisions / mistakes.

I feel a lot of this makes sense, no doubt there is huge mistakes made on nuclear strategy.  On renewables we need to invest in them, but I think it has not been managed properly, we have days when they generate "too much" but then cant store that excess in batteries for later use when they not generating.  We also have not invested in renewable sources that would be more consistent around the year such as hydro power.  I read of plans near Liverpool, but that of course has Nimby's fighting it.

The_Green_Hornet

Britain’s gas storage levels ‘concerningly low’ after extreme cold, says British Gas owner

Britain’s gas storage levels are “concerningly low” with less than a week of demand in store, the operator of the country’s largest gas storage site has said.

Plunging temperatures and high demand for gas-fired power stations are the main factors behind the low levels, Centrica said.

Britain’s gas storage levels ‘concerningly low’ after extreme cold, says British Gas owner | The Independent

Chrysalis

The_Green_Hornet said:

Britain’s gas storage levels ‘concerningly low’ after extreme cold, says British Gas owner

Britain’s gas storage levels are “concerningly low” with less than a week of demand in store, the operator of the country’s largest gas storage site has said.

Plunging temperatures and high demand for gas-fired power stations are the main factors behind the low levels, Centrica said.

Britain’s gas storage levels ‘concerningly low’ after extreme cold, says British Gas owner | The Independent

All normal for Britain then.  Everything is fine, nothing to worry about.

Scot_39

The_Green_Hornet said:

Britain’s gas storage levels ‘concerningly low’ after extreme cold, says British Gas owner

Britain’s gas storage levels are “concerningly low” with less than a week of demand in store, the operator of the country’s largest gas storage site has said.

Plunging temperatures and high demand for gas-fired power stations are the main factors behind the low levels, Centrica said.

Britain’s gas storage levels ‘concerningly low’ after extreme cold, says British Gas owner | The Independent

Wouldn't be an attempt to fuel price speculation for their products by any chance - or am I being too cynical ?

The UK has less storage but a bit more than 2022 levels  - in part because Centrica wanted £ milliions in taxpayers money to maintain it.

But they themselves want to  to use iirc Rough for hydrogen not natural gas - been talking about raising £bns to do so for at least 2-3 years - which would then reduce UK natural gas storage even further.

And of course despite next weeks far higher temperatures from Sun / Mon.

So a week being potentially a fairly comfortable period given we only ever have a couple of weeks in any case at peak winter demand.

Oops couple of weeks in fact an overestimate as 

From Centrica themselves today

"The UK has some of the lowest levels of gas storage in Europe at 12 days average or 7.5 peak winter days."

QrizB

The_Green_Hornet said:

Britain’s gas storage levels ‘concerningly low’ after extreme cold, says British Gas owner

Britain’s gas storage levels are “concerningly low” with less than a week of demand in store, the operator of the country’s largest gas storage site has said.

Plunging temperatures and high demand for gas-fired power stations are the main factors behind the low levels, Centrica said.

Britain’s gas storage levels ‘concerningly low’ after extreme cold, says British Gas owner | The Independent

I read that as saying that, if the UK was prevented from receiving any additional gas (the pipelines were closed and no LNG tankers were to dock) and if no additional measures were taken to reduce demand, we'd run out of gas in a week.

What would be more useful (but less headline-worthy) would be an estimate of by how much consumption is exceeding supply, and how long our reserves will be able to continue to make up the difference.

Anyway, the Govt says we've got enough gas. That's alright then, panic over.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7vd57qzlqpo

Lorian

DFS for Gas?

stripling

@Chrysalis
The article states we paid well over normal market rate for the emergency supply, what part of that is inaccurate?  There was no part of the article that said it is all profit.
I have no bias towards the industry or feel any need to defend it, problems are problems.

For someone with 'no bias' you sure as hell read selectively and ignore the other posts. 😁 NESO - the Grid operator clearly stated it was no big deal and is a regular occurrence - I included links to the quote. The same article also points out that news media chooses to make scare story dramatic headlines for their own purposes. 

Alongside this, as I said, we have battery storage that COULD have been used but because of the way our broken market is structured the battery operators made more money selling their energy elsewhere instead of to the national grid... In an intelligent market design they should've been incentivised to operate as 'peakers' on the Balancing Mechanism (plugging grid shortages).  Instead, we leave the door open for gas plant owners to manipulate the market. 

The problems have almost zero to do with renewables and nearly EVERYTHING to do with the way our energy market is structured... Including, as I said, the way certain hedge funds are dirty dealing in the Dutch TTF market... Blowing up nonsense stories about 'geopolitics' or 'storage' pumping up their funds then dumping at a time of their choosing. As I said yesterday, even Donald Tusk is arguing they need stricter regulation to stop their manipulation. 

There's a lot of nonsense being promoted by vested interests in the carbon heavy industries, include utter twaddle about the Rough Storage facility being lobbied by Centrica who of course has an interest... 

Meanwhile, British consumers pay OTT prices... 

debitcardmayhem

Timely news from NESO https://www.neso.energy/news/britains-electricity-explained-2024-review