Britain’s gas reserves have dwindled to a “concerning” low with just a week of supply left as freezing temperatures and low winds grip the country this weekend.
The UK’s storage sites are about half full, said British Gas owner Centrica – 26pc lower than this time last year.
It comes amid a battle over the future of Centrica’s Rough undersea storage facility with Centrica seeking subsidies to fund a £2bn expansion plan.
The third of those paragraphs is the important one. We’ve been getting thos story at about this time of the winter for some years now – for no one has given in on the subsidy as yet.
Ho Hum.
Hey, it might even be true, what’s being said. But it’s still a subsidy bid.
“The UK’s storage sites are about half full”
Should have said half empty, amateurs at this begging lark.
I think their mistake is trying to do something that might work. If they were building wind turbines or cucumber farms the government would throw money at them.
Sarah Breeden, the Bank’s deputy governor, said households and businesses were paying more for energy because of so-called carbon permits, which require power plants to pay for each tonne of carbon dioxide they emit.
These permits accounted for nearly half the cost of fuel bought by gas-fired power plants last year, Ms Breeden said, which was passed on to consumers.
Who cares ?- wind power is the future according to Mad Ed.
I’ll be entertained to see if Dutton’s Aussie proposal to stop that horrid carbon buildup by building nukes instead of windmills works out.
Needless to say, the climate drongos find his idea appalling.
A couple of days ago, the shortage of power meant that the UK came within about 500mw of major blackouts occurring. If the utter fools keep moving ever more power generation over to wind and solar, a major collapse of the power supply would seem to be inevitable. It won’t be like the 1970s when we could just light candles and huddle around the fire, nowadays everything runs on electricity.
Stonyground
It will be concerning if the shortage is sudden and creates a grid instability resulting in a cascade failure, say if an interconnector goes down. Having to black start the grid will be… Fun since we got rid of coal plants.
People don’t realise how much is going to fail.
Everything.
They won’t be able to go to Tesco and pay by card.
Central heating won’t work.
No petrol or diesel available – petrol stations need power.
No phone network, no internets.
A few things have backups, but there will be chaos and panic. Especially when it takes days to come back on.
If the storage is only half-full, or half-empty as you like, that’s means there’s plenty of storage doesn’t it, they just need to fill it?
Too simple?
They’ll do everything they can to cover up the shortage. This will mean disconnecting what’s left of our industry first. Then there’s a load of diesel generators sitting around collecting subsidies that they can fire up at the cost of even more money.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/STOR%20Frequently%20Asked%20Questions%20v2%20%281%29.pdf
Will the lights stay on even with this? Who knows? Mad Milli doesn’t.
@JohnB
But if you pay for a storage facility, fill it with gas bought more cheaply in summer, then sell into a tight market at enough to make the effort worthwhile…..profiteer! Confiscate it! Fix the price!…
It’s no wonder Centrica don’t want to take this on, on their own. 100% downside.
It’s only viable if the Government are paying the running cost and then either making the “excess profits” or more likely, selling at a major loss. Centrica just being the lackey, paid for their work.
Gas storage, eh? What if we had our own, regular supply? I mean after all, the North Sea allegedly still has plenty. The Norwegians aren’t short, for a start.
Meanwhile, it’s a lovely, crisp, sunny day. Solar: 9% of demand. 3.6 GW from an installed theoretical capacity of 25GW. Wind: 8%. 3.1 GW from an installed theoretical capacity of 25GW. Ccgt: 52%. 22 GW from an installed actual capacity of 25GW. Perhaps we need that storage after all, and maybe a few more Ccgt stations to burn it.
We only have a couple of weeks worth of storage. All other European countries have much more, maybe 14 weeks.
That’s because we still have some regular supply from the North Sea and import terminals for LNG, so we need less strategic reserve.
That is, until the existing N Sea fields are tapped out. Or we get in a spat with Qatar or the USA and they decide to reroute and sell to the Japs instead of us.
Yeah Norman. If only!!!
Oz exports lots and lots of coal and gas.
But we still waste oodles of money on windmills and solar panels.
Boganboy:
I’ll be entertained to see if Dutton’s Aussie proposal to stop that horrid carbon buildup by building nukes instead of windmills works out.
Needless to say, the climate drongos find his idea appalling.
Yeah, I heard a hilarious but also enraging piece about the Liberals’ election campaign where the ABC git wondered whether the Liberals were out of touch in the marginals in part because they campaigned No on the Racist Voice referendum.
60% of Aussies voted No, and No is the out of touch position?
It doesn’t matter how much gas there is in storage if you haven’t got the generating Calicut to meet demand.
Yeah Ted, apparently no doesn’t mean no here in Oz 🙂 the usual suspects are still going on about it.
Martin, my employer has a deal with our electricity supplier to fire up our diesel genset on peak demand days. I’m not privy to the details, there are conditions and limits and such, but apparently it saves us a lot of money on the leccie bill. So here at least, that sort of shadow demand management is already happening. It wouldn’t surprise me if the UK had similar arrangements in place.
@Ltw
Yes, there are schemes in the UK for people to make their diesel gensets available for STOR (Short Term Operating Reserve). A while ago I was looking for something, and came across the site of a company that will manage this wort of thing for you.
It needs changes to allow the genset to parallel to the mains, plus remote controls to allow it to be started when required. It has a number of benefits: apart from the passive income from just having it available; if it’s called on you get paid more for the lecky; and it can make fuel management easier because even if you never get called upon, just being able to parallel with the mains means you can periodically run it up to full power for testing, and turn over some of your fuel. Many backup gensets fail to work when called upon needed because they’ve not been run at any power since they were installed, and the fuel is very old and has gone off in some way.
But back to the original story.
As pointed out, for Centrica (or anyone) to run such a storage facility on their own doesn’t make economic sense. It costs money to run, ties up a lot of cash in the stored gas, risks losses if the market doesn’t behave as expected, and if they do make a profit the government will come along and confiscate it by way of an economically innumerate tax.
So in the same way that “someone” will pay gas power stations to remain operable even when their duty cycle is very low – “because energy security” – “someone” needs to pay for the gas storage to enable those power stations to run on the occasions they need to.
Now, someone only a little more mischievous than me could wait for another such occasion (low gas reserves, low electricity system margin) and decide to just turn off the storage facility (sorry guv, someone pressed the wrong button !) If we were indeed down to under 1/2GW of reserve, it wouldn’t take long for some lights to go out, and having the lights go out would certainly make the general population sit up and take an interest in a way I suspect few even think about the issue now.
If nothing else, it would be a good point to get people asking “so, about all these windmills – what do they do in calm weather again ?”
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