On Wednesday 8 January 2025 the UK came within a hair’s breadth of a national power blackout. Traffic lights stopping, trains halting, street lights going out, the main electricity supply ceasing to be available.

It has been suggested that the National Grid came closer than the regulator has admitted to this chaos, due to the drive to achieve Net Zero goals by 2030.

The last time this happened was in 2019. There was a lightning strike that took out 2 big power stations and we had widespread blackouts that covered about 40% of the country but fortunately this happened in the summer so it didn’t have as critical an impact as it would during the autumn and winter months, when it could lead to fatalities.

Even trains were unable to restart remotely so the main impact for the public was transport disruption. People with laptops had to travel around the country restarting stranded trains so that they could continue on their journeys. It was several hours before full power was restored in all areas of the country. This was merely the time it took to get everyone back up and running. This incident affected the east of England and happened on an afternoon and evening in mid-August so there was no issue with darkness or cold and was an inconvenience for many rather than dangerous. Hospitals have backup generation but the problem is if you have that sort of event in the winter when it’s dark and cold then it becomes far more dangerous and especially when people don’t expect it.

One of my YouTube subscribers sent me the link to an UnHeard podcast with Kathryn Porter, an independent energy consultant. This was serendipitous as I had already started researching this subject in order to start a discussion on my channel. Below is the link to the podcast should you wish to watch it, however I will attempt to unpack the science in layman’s terms in order to make it easier for people to comprehend. My own video presentation is appended at the very end of this blog.

HOW IS OUR ENERGY SUPPLIED?

It is very difficult to store electricity on such a large scale and almost none of it is stored. We have to generate the electricity we need when we need it, for example in real time. This is very important because electrical equipment starts playing up when this balance isn’t always maintained. There are all sorts of protection systems built into the grid, at power stations, sub-stations, power lines etc. They will also disconnect themselves if this balance isn’t properly maintained, so it is essential that it is always met in real time.

So you have generation and demand. Historically, generation came from a relatively small number of big power stations – coal, gas, oil and nuclear. The demand was reasonably predictable and was primarily driven by the weather so when it was cold demand went up and when it was warmer and sunnier demand went down.

The National Energy System Operator (NESO) is responsible for deciding how much energy is necessary to meet demand on the basis that the market balances itself so through price signals people will choose whether or not to run their power station because they can make money and normally you make money where there is enough demand that you will need it. This works quite well but the grid itself is complicated. National Grid runs something called the Transition System which is a high voltage grid and is the electricity equivalent of motorways and big A roads. It is the way that you funnel electricity around the country in bulk and according to demand. However, just like traffic jams there are constraints in the electricity grid and so just because you might have a lot of generation in one part of the country you might not be able to move that electricity to where the demand is or you might have an uneven distribution of demand, such as lots of demand in the south-east but less in Scotland. So the National Grid and NESO is responsible for managing that in real time, so it is they who decide what is necessary and from which source and this is done through something known as the balancing mechanism. People, generators and suppliers will say these are the prices which we are willing to increase generation, reduce generation, and the same with demand and that’s how decisions are made based on that pricing.

WHO ARE OUR SUPPLY PARTNERS AND AT WHAT COST?

Below is the list of average energy prices paid per annum across Western Europe:-

• 650 Euros – France
• 650 Euros – Belgium
• 620 Euros – Spain
• 558 Euros – Germany
• 558 Euros – Denmark
• 546 Euros – Holland
• 545 Euros – Austria
• 543 Euros – Norway
• 476 Euros – Finland
• 174 Euros – Poland
• 2,960 Euros – UK

As you can see from the list, by comparison the average UK householder pays at least several times these amounts! Why is this?

A BBC article online dated 31 January 2023 reported that, according to Reform UK, an estimated 87% of energy and water companies in England and Wales are foreign-owned and in 2022 The Guardian newspaper estimated that 70% of the English water industry is in overseas ownership, though overall estimates do vary. In the article, the Reform UK party proposes that companies supplying and distributing energy and water would continue to be run by private firms but 50% would be government-owned and 50% by “British pension funds”. Richard Tice the then-leader of Reform UK said that no other nation had allowed so much of its infrastructure to be in foreign hands and we are being hit in the pocket under the current system.

So why is this?

In the podcast, Kathryn Porter explains that we have no large oil power stations at all on the UK grid and have recently closed the last coal power station. We have opened a lot of wind generation on shore and off-shore. We have some solar and have opened a lot more interconnectors, which are import/export cables with other countries. We have had one with France for many decades, and have built another two with France. We also have them with Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. We exchange electricity with these other countries. What is making the system more complex is that wind and solar depend on the weather on a large, or macro scale because sometimes whole days are not windy or sunny and the highest period of demand every day is dinner time and in the winter dinner time happens at night so there is no solar at all during the peak in winter. However, there are micro level effects where individual gusts of wind or clouds will make a difference to your output moment to moment and so maintaining that match between generation and demand all the time becomes harder and unsustainable. Demand also gets more complicated because people might have solar panels on their roof and that looks like negative demand to the grid. People have electric cars and electrification is going to make quite a big difference to demand and so that becomes more complicated as well. The whole picture is a lot more complex and more vulnerable than it used to be 30 years ago.

The move towards renewables which people may be in favour of rather than solely being reliant on fossil fuels, the downside is that because it is variable it means that our whole system is more vulnerable to potential pressure points or even blackouts. Another big way in which renewables are causing fragility to the system. There is current and voltage on the electricity system which is alternating current – it varies in a fairly regular wave shape and this wave shape is literally generated by gas and nuclear turbines all rotating at the same speed. They rotate at 3000 revolutions per minute, which means that the wave is varying at 50 cycles per second, which is how the voltage is created and  enables a plug-in appliance, for example, to work properly. The grid frequency, this ambient wave, is a really important measure within the electricity system and the difficulty is that wind and solar don’t generate this. They generate direct current such as a battery, so that doesn’t vary at all and on a chart it would show as a straight line so you have to use electronics to change it so that it can fit in with what’s happening on the grid. The problem is, if you start replacing your gas and nuclear turbines with renewables you lose the mechanism that creates the ambient wave. Gas turbines are big, heavy machines and resist changes to their speed of rotation. You want them at 3000 revolutions per minute so that you get that nice regular wave, but if you take away the gas turbine and replace it with renewables, you don’t get that. If you don’t have that stable wave happening all the time then that will lead to blackouts. Electrical equipment is so sensitive to that measure, the more we replace conventional generation with renewable energy the less stable the grid becomes.

A report by Kathryn Porter includes a graph showing the typical generation mix on a low-wind day in winter. Gas is the big chunk of this throughout the day, a big peak at dinnertime and then it comes down. There is some 10% from interconnectors, nuclear is providing 10%, biomass provides a little bit but suddenly when you look at the gas band, it is 50%. So the reality is that there is a tiny bit of solar between 11am and 2pm, but isn’t making a huge amount of difference. So basically we are still reliant on gas – and that is the problem because we are not generating enough of it.

The BBC article dated 31 January 2023 says that foreign takeovers of British companies can be blocked on grounds of national security, which happened in the case of the sale of Newport Wafer Fab to a Chinese-owned company by using the the National Security and Investment Act.

Labour intend to launch a tax-payer owned energy company modelled on France’s EDF. Named Great British Energy, it would be set up with public money but would be operated independently with any profits being reinvested.

Meanwhile, the Green Party have proposed permanently nationalising the ‘Big Five’ UK energy suppliers. This would cost an estimated £2.85 bn and would allow them to return the price cap to where it was in autumn 2022 and keep it at that level for a year.

HOW DID THINGS GO WRONG ON 8 JANUARY AND WHAT WAS THE RESPONSE?

On 8 January it was a cold day and demand ended up being higher than NESO had forecast for the day itself and higher than it had forecast for the average cold spell weather in the winter. Every year NESO produces a Winter Outlook, which tells you how much it think the demand will be and how much spare capacities, the excess amount available over demand, it will have. In October 2024 when it published that for this year, it predicted that the demand would be lower than it had been and the capacity margin would be higher. Then last Wednesday the demand turned out to be higher than the Winter Outlook had suggested and also higher than NESO’s own short-term forecasts. It was also a low wind day. Demand that day was 47 gigawats (the unit of measure) and we had only 2.5 gigawats of wind. On a good day there might be 16 or 17 gigawats. Some days we’ve had as low as 0.5 gigawats so it wasn’t the worst day but was still pretty bad. The other big impact was that the import cables had much lower availability either than normal or that NESO had said in its Winter Outlook, so we only had 5.7 gigawats available in the interconnectors. So every day everyone has to tell NESO what they are going to do and the interconnectors were all saying that they would be importing to Britain at their maximum availability through the day. So there was no leeway for NESO to ask to import a little bit more, there was literally nothing more available. So at 12.01 pm on that day NESO issued a capacity market notice, an automatic trigger warning to say that they had identified or the system had calculated that there was only 500 megawats of spare margin so more generation than expected demand. Because these notices are autogenerated, and sometimes look at out of date data, they are not the most reliable measure and especially as demand forecasts can be out of kilter by quite a margin. Catherine Porter says that she has some analysis that suggests that in the past 4 years, from the day ahead forecast, the error can be as high as 4.7 gigawats. So almost double the amount of wind that was blowing last week on the Wednesday.

The evening before, they had issued an Electricity Market Notice, which is actually a more serious warning. These notices are not issued automatically but from the control room staff identifying a potential problem. Normally, any type of these warnings get cancelled well before the actual real time moment but that Electricity Market Notice did not get cancelled until after the start of the period that it covered.  This notice is set out in the grid code which is part of the rule book that drives the way the system works, so it alerts market participants to the fact that we are no longer in a business in its usual mode, we are in a mode where we are expecting some issues, so we are alerting power stations that they need to run if they can, alerting local low-voltage grids and suppliers that there might be a need for demand control which is when they actually start disconnecting load, so regions of the country could be disconnected. They notify the market of different types of tools that they might engage as there could be a potential blackout otherwise. Later that day, a third kind of notification was issued. A company called Elexon which is involved in managing the energy and electricity market issued a Loss of Load Probability (LoLP). Loss of load literally  means disconnections, which can be local or national level blackouts. Alexon doesn’t issue these as notices but as a continuous calculation you can refer to at any particular time. It was 29% over 4 hours which was the highest it had reached and it is very unusual to see a loss of load probability that is not zero and it is even more unusual to see a loss of load probability that is still not zero once you get to the period it is talking about and on 8 January it never went to zero. Elexon gets its data from NESO and is not producing it independently. As we went through the evening peak, the system was showing all the time that there was a non-zero loss of load probability. So official data suggests that there was a 27%-29% change that there would have been at least some people being disconnected.

In response (Tom Whipple, science editor of the Times wrote), the energy operator insisted that, contrary to  some interpretations of raw data, that we were never close a blackout on 8 January and that it was a misconception to think that a 29% risk LoLP is a warning that the buffer would run out because there was an additional buffer that they didn’t describe and didn’t publish all the data of in the publicly available dashboards and everyone was panicking about January 8th but actually there was a whole additional supply of electricity that had we hit rock bottom they could have called upon.

David Rose, Editor of UnHeard asked for the evidence of this additional supply and to detail it for us and they refused to do so and said that as an operator for the whole of the UK they don’t talk about individual units because they have lots of customers and technologies and don’t set out a list of assets that could cover a particular loss. 

SQSS – there has to be a security standard but the standard was breached on 8 January. The idea is that they have a reserve which can be activated quickly. NESO has a duty of transparency so refusing to publish that data flies in the face of that transparency. It is also not the case that they don’t provide unit level information. They provide masses of unit level information through the Elexon website. Any of us can go on to the Elexon website to see what a power station was intending to do that day, was doing that day, if it changed what it did because of instructions from the National Grid, how much it got paid to make those changes. Why were they saying they said they didn’t have this information, when it is so crucial and is suddenly being held from the market and appears to be a rather inconsistent reason when looking at their normal practice? What are they trying to hide?

They said that the cables coming in from Norway provide an additional 14 megawats. This is what we were expecting to receive but the interconnector with Norway was performing at maximum capacity that whole day and there were no extra reserves that they could call on because it was all spoken for. The interconnector with Denmark is also 1400 megawatts and was expecting to run at half the capacity because of a maintenance outage but they were persuaded, or requested, to bring the interconnector early and so they did. Without that extra 700 megawatts from the Danish interconnector we would not have been able to meet demand that day.  Contrary to what the regulator said, NESO cannot demand imports, so it was a request and therefore Denmark could have refused to supply any extra megawatts at all and therefore we came very close to a blackout that day. You can try and buy the extra energy if you are willing to offer more money than others but you cannot compel it.

As part of the Security Standard, or SQSS they are supposed to have a margin over demand (a backup plan) and have this reserve and the purpose of the reserve is to replace the biggest generation or import source that comes into the grid without getting hit in the pocket. So if you lose a big piece of generation or imports suddenly, then you disrupt that nice grid frequency (waves) and that can lead to blackouts (ie 2019). The idea is that they have this reserve that can be activated quickly. It should be very easy to identify which units, which power stations or batteries can provide that because they have to be instructed quickly. You can’t have hundreds of components you can make it up from, it has to be a few big assets to be able to do that.

It is also interesting that on 8 January prices in the market went sky high. You could make a lot of money running your power station. For example, Rye House was being run at a price of £5,500 a megawatt hour when the normal winter price is about £120-150, so they made more than £2 million for just a couple of hours of running and only at half the station capacity as well. So looking at the National Grid, who was providing this reserve? (Catherine said) Who decided that they weren’t going to bother making all these millions they could have been making by running that day? The just sat on the sidelines just in case. If they had decided to do that, how much did they pay them to do that? Which were these assets that were not taking advantage of these high market prices and already running? If they are already running they are not hidden in the pocket and therefore on 8 January the Security Standard was breached.

WHAT CHALLENGES DO WE FACE IN THE FUTURE?

On the current timeline, the likelihood of power outages and blackouts is likely to increase as we move closer to 2030. In 2027 we are scheduled to lose 2 of our nuclear power stations. There is uncertainty in the future of the biomass power stations because their subsidies expire at roughly the same time. Gas power stations are coming to the end of their lives. Many of them were built in the late 1990s and early 2000s with an expected lifetime of 25-30 years. This retirement plan is likely to excelerate if people believe the strategy for the gas power stations which is that by 2030 they will only be producing 5% of average annual demand. The Labour government wants to fast-forward this process towards increased renewable supply and less and less gas. And yet to meet the capacity market keep the entire 35 gw of existing gas power stations in reserve which is extremely unlikely to be achievable due to their lifespan. Batteries we have at the moment run out in an average of 1.50 hours. We have low wind conditions that can last for days, so chemical batteries won’t do this and the amount we would need to build to back up. Someone once worked out that you would need more land than we have in the UK for these batteries to fully backup wind so it’s completely unfeasible with the current technology.

Bills have been going up very consistently for the last 15 years, though more so since the global incident and the war in Ukraine, and at a time where gas prices had not been going up and were stable because of the energy transition. So you subsidise your wind power stations and your solar but then because you have the situation that it’s not always windy, you then have to build at least the same amount of capacity of something else, whether gas or nuclear or import cables and this is incredibly wasteful because you have to double up on everything. Then there is the additional infrastructure you have to build so one of the problems with the current plan which NESO has identified in their report on the Clean Power 2030 strategy is that you will have to build twice as much grid infrastructure – power lines, cables etc – in the next 5 years as we built in the previous 10 years. This is extremely likely due to the supply chains, as the planning process is very long-winded and you have 3-4 year lead times for big transformers. Nobody is going to order a big transformer if they don’t have planning permission. So if the planning permission for your power line doesn’t happen in the next year, you won’t have the kit on site to build your power line by 2030.  We have the highest industrial energy prices and industrial activity is declining as a result of this.

We are paying billions of pounds a year because we haven’t built all of the grid infrastructure to allow the generation from the wind farms to reach consumers, and they have a subsidy that they only receive if they are generating and if they have to stop generating then they have to be compensated for that and those too are billions of pounds a year and this all goes straight to bills. The govt says oh renewables are incredibly cheap but where is the data to back that up? They just make statements with no substance. Well, renewables get a wholesale price for electricity but unfortunately the more renewables you have the bigger the gap between the wholesale price and the retail price that businesses and households pay because effectively a lot of the costs of renewables are not paid by the renewable generators, they are paid by consumers. Net Zero is pie in the sky! And if we start having “mythical” blackouts then that might impact people how they think about this, not to mention the economic costs as well, and already they are very unpopular many voters.

Given all the above, how are we expected to charge up our electric vehicles, power up our laptops and other devices, run our heat pumps and other methods of sustainability and cook our meals in the Net Zero utopia? Also there is a huge carbon footprint major toxic pollutions of rivers and  land particularly in China where a lot of these components renewables are manufactured by forced labour. China dominates “rare earth” production because it is the only country willing to do these extremely polluting processes. How is that going to save the Planet? Nuclear energy is cleaner energy, it’s running all the time and when you actually add up all the costs of making renewables happen, then nuclear is quite competitive and it is not more expensive than wind.  KEPCO built 8 big modern power stations called the APR1400 – 4 in S Korea and 4 in UAE –  and they were built on average in 8.5 years each and came in on time and broadly on budget. Sign a deal with KEPCO for 5 or 6 to start with,  pay for the first two with public money because the other problem we have is persuading private investors to come in, refinance after the first construction phase because they will make a ton of money when they are running, the risk is all in the building. So once they are built, sell the government stake to the private sector at a profit and make money for taxpayers and you would probably in that process demonstrate that your regulatory ducks are all lined up for the delivery of new nuclear so you would get private finance in for construction for subsequent projects. This would be the quickest, cheapest and most efficient way of delivering nuclear.

Someone said: “I left the UK 25 years ago. I live in Texas and own a large solar power plant. As a banker, I have also financed US wind, hydro, solar, coal and glass plants. I used to develop and finance gas, coal and wind power plants in the UK in the 1990s. My boss was a main board director at National Grid and one of my colleagues helped design the UK electricity market. I have also forecast gas and electricity prices in the UK. I used to know the UK market inside out. I have told people for years that closing the base load plants was idiotic and that net zero represented national suicide. I have also developed coal plants in India and China. Nobody in the power industry globally understand what Britain is trying to do. The political media class has been brainwashed and Milliband and Boris are idiots. They don’t understand how any of this works.”

WHAT CAN WE DO IN THE EVENT OF A BLACKOUT?

Here are a few ideas:-

1. Butane gas cylinder and camping stove
2. A portable or standby generator such as a Jackery or Bluetti – one you can plug appliances into and can be charged up or work on solar.
3. Off-grid Batteries or battery backup system with smart battery management system and Bluetooth – good for van lifers too.
4. Solar panels or other solar powered items including task lighting.

Like a scout, on a day-to-day basis endeavour to be prepared for any eventuality in whatever way(s) you can and within your means and you won’t go far wrong. In the event of a crisis most people will pull together and get through the experience all the wiser.

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Catherine