Post mortem analysis shows that Langage and Peterhead did not in fact suffer trips. The LCP Delta alert feed seems to have been misled (and indeed started repeating old messages about LOLP).
Both did make some rather odd nominations of Maximum Export Limit during the day that were inconsistent with their output nominations called Final Physical Nomination. See the green line compared with the purple one here
Thx for posting. I had raked through REMIT myself to find those and decided someone of LCPs status must have access to some other data source us mere mortals can't see!!
I've actually seen these erroneous trip messages before on LCP Enact.
Octopus secured a bid for £900/MWh to provide about 90MW of DFS over the hour from 5p.m. while paying customers 72p/kWh and taking 18p/kWh to cover their own administrative costs and profit. Such a low volume is never going to save the grid. The thing is, when they were being paid £5-6,000/MWh customer uptake nationally was not a whole lot higher than the maximum of 184MW in the recent event. NESO paid a maximum of £1,200/MWh for DFS, accepting every offer except for a tiny volume offered at £1,290/MWh at 4p.m. when supply was less tight.
At the moment NESO have decided to downgrade DFS because it is basically next to useless. Quite how we will get to 10GW of using electricity flexibly, Albert, as dreamt for CP2030, remains to be seen. Naked power cuts must be favourite.
I keep my Gridwatch app at the ready to capture looming blackout situations (so easy on my Samsung, just wave the side of the hand across the screen to take a “photo”). At 10am this morning UK demand stood at 44.74 GW (slightly higher than NESO’s supposed winter max of 44.4), wind was at 7%, solar zero.
They say the wind is going to fall later today and my local forecast is for -7°C at 5pm. Could this be it?!
This illustrates perfectly the point that I have made several times. The use of renewables will always require ongoing duplicative capital investments in gas/nuclear for backup when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. That alone explains why renewables can never deliver reduced household energy bills.
But on top of that (and of course The Guardian entirely misses the point) because these duplicate investments ARE only backups, it means that then they are needed to supply power the prices, of necessity, will be much higher to offset the idle time and make the investment viable. Otherwise, why would anyone undertake such investments?
Sadly, it’s the same everywhere, shutting down low cost baseload power plants and replacing them with moonbeams and unicorn farts, and tripling consumer electricity bills. It’s happening all over Europe, in the US and in Canada.
A careful look at the chart from the Daily Mail article will show that, over the last 3 years or so, the increase in wind and solar has been mostly offset by the decline in nuclear generation. The total amount of clean energy generation shows very little change, the decline in gas and coal use has been replaced mostly by an increase in imports.
Relying on imports when neighbouring countries are also relying on wind and solar is not "security of supply"
Besides that they rely on dirty biomass burning to supply the reliable part of their scam - I mean plan, which they officially declare to be "carbon neutral". Whereas the EIA puts biomass power at 1400 gms/kwh vs 1100 gms/kwh for bituminous coal, in conventional coal burners. Why not just officially declare gas to be "carbon neutral" and then they can really brag about how green they are.
The point is that wind and solar deliver next to nothing at night when there is little or no wind and so there is absolutely no point at all in building more capacity. That's just about the end of the story.
On a point of detail, talking about clean energy is unhelpful because it implies that CO2, the breath of life, is a pollutant.
That is the foundational lie that drives the alarmist scam and the net zero Ponzi and casual references to clean energy help to perpetuate it.
Milliband is an easy target. He's a very left wing politician, he can't manage a bacon sandwich, he became leader of the Labour party through union machinations that permanently alienated his more capable brother. And there's the Ed Stone. But he's not an idiot. Why then will he not see what is plain to everybody?
Unless 'everybody' is all those people he's not friends with, has no interest in, and who don't go to those fashionable north London dinner parties. About 68m people at last count.
Thank you David! I'm not the first today to ask the first question on my list:
1) Are those now in charge agents of a hostile foreign power?
2) If so, which?
2) If not, how can we tell the difference?
I'm afraid only blackouts and a crisis will wake folk up. There will be many lies told, but we can hope the truth will emerge - power lines shorted by bullshit.
They are all minions of the Central Bank Cartel that pretty much runs the Western World, based in Basel, Switzerland. And they are the original Club of Rome Malthusian, Misanthropes, basically hate humanity, ascribe to some Doomer, DeGrowth, Deindustrialization cult code. And are trying to complete a century old dream of theirs of World Government, a neo-feudal, centralized, top-down oligarchy. And a scarcity economy is an important part of their strategy.
"We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest"
Paul Warburg, the International Banker testifying to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1950
Depopulation: "I Hope It Can Occur In a Civil Manner"
"The World can support something like a billion people, maybe two billion"
" I know in one way or another it's going to come back down so I don't hope to avoid that, I hope that it can occur in a civil way "
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto determination practiced in past centuries.”
David Rockefeller in an address to a Trilateral Commission meeting in June of 1991
“This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long – We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”
David Rockefeller, Club of Rome, Sept. 23, 1994
“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will.
If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
from David Rockefeller’s autobiography ‘Memoirs’
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) president Philip Mountbatten who stated in a 1981 interview with People magazine:
“Human population growth is probably the single most serious long-term threat to survival. We’re in for a major disaster if it isn’t curbed—not just for the natural world, but for the human world. The more people there are, the more resources they’ll consume, the more pollution they’ll create, the more fighting they’ll do. We have no option. If it isn’t controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily.”..."
" Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it. "
Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
" The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet. "
Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
" Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. "
I agree that only blackouts will wake people up to the situation they are in. A near blackout doesn't matter because only a tiny fraction of the population will even know it happened. I just hope the blackouts happen somewhere other than where I live!
What really depresses me, living in Brasil, is knowing that our Lula government is going fast downhill into the green energy scam even when just looking at Germany, the UK, California and South Australia shows how bad things can get.
But at least those countries are developed countries, I hope their people will see the light soon, and they will correct course in time.
But here for us in Brazil, desperatelly in need of economic growth and productivity increases, this will be a fatal blow that I am not sure we will be able to recover from.
What Greg Jackson conveniently fails to mention on his tweet is what Demand Flexibility Service means in reality: Disconnect consumers to reduce demand. Kind of a "voluntary" blackout.
They aren't actually disconnected. Their use over the half hourly periods they sign up for is compared against "normal", and they get paid for any apparent reduction.
Probably no other way of doing it but hardly guarantees what level of reduction your going to achieve which i why guess previously they made it very enticing but now the rate has been massively dropped its not going to alter behaviour.
At least until appliances can be centrally controlled, which is already here for EV chargers, which by law must gave such facilities included, although the user us for now allowed to overrule them (but the cost will be high for doing so).
The thing is that when they offered £5-6,000/MWh the take-up was really very limited at under 300MW. Cheaper to use Rye House. In any event, there was significant gaming of the system with people purposely inflating use during the reference period in order to maximise apparent saving. DFS is not going to save the system: only compulsory reductions can do that.
The two generators that provided backup at the last minute were apparently not available for use, for whatever reason, during the day. So they were actually paid a fortune to respond to the shortage that they had contributed to in the first place. Just bad luckfor us and good luck for them, or something more sinister we will never know! It might have been better to turn down their vastly over-priced offer and let Ed Miliband see what happens when a lack wind and solar coincides with high demand, as it will many times in the future. Meanwhile we in Wales are being told we need Bute Energy to cover the countryside in turbines and concrete because we need more wind for cheap electricity. You couldn't make it up!!
Thats incorrect Rye Hse ran in the morning peak and was scheduled to come off at lunchtime but NESO then instructed them all afternoon to hold at 410MW.
Connahs Quay-3 also had the same schedule and NESO constantly instructed them all afternoon as well.
They got rid of them when Viking link came back upto full power by the looks of it.
Those operators may have deliberately adopted this schedule in anticipation of an opportunity who knows but the bottom line is the drive to push baseload generators off the system is creating these sort of opportunities.
Interesting the mkt went completely the opposite way this afternoon and system price came nowhere near the day ahead price despite similar conditions in play.
Journalists will happily quote people with a public profile. These days few if them have the expertise to tease out the truth, especially if their editors prefer propaganda.
That makes sense. Maybe I misunderstood the information I was given, or the information was incorrect. I apologise anyway, I didn't intend to mislead anyone. Thank you for putting me right. I will be interested to see how these scenarios play out in the future.
The Guardian made them out to be bad boys but the system acted as it should. A CMN was issued which requires all generators operational to make themselves available and they did. They maybe gaming the system but media really dont understand the system. Rye House isn't a high volume generator so that suggests to me it has no long term contracts so its probably making itself available in the day ahead mkt. This means its buying gas on the spot mkt as well and that was getting pricey on the 8th after midday so its offer were probably already too high and suppliers either went elsewhere or decided to take their chances in the BM. Then come the day of the races and a couple of outages and higher forecast demand than expected left NESO with limited options to keep the lights on. The price of gas was probably even higher on the day so Rye Hse price/MWh reflects that.
In the grand scheme of things it will be smoothed out over a year when majority of prices are made at the long run average. If the Guardian were that bothered they would be raising the fact that NESO spent 320m in December on balancing the system and 90% of that was down to transmission constraints. The hobby horse they should be pedalling is the Nimbys that prevent transmission lines being built and the useless OFGEM that is supposed to act in the interest of consumers but has failed to do so. Millibrain and Starkie should have fixed these issues first not just doubled down more like tripled down on the flawed system that already exists.
This whole situation quite certainly tempts certain generating stations to be unavailable when it is most convenient to them, and suddenly be ready to produce when they get offered a nice amount of money. Doesn’t seem like a far fetched hypothesis to me…
Oh dear, 46.8GW peak demand when they were only anticipating 44.4. That's quite a difference. I wonder why. Maybe all those hotels across the country hosting residents who are not used to our chilly British weather should be put on mandatory Agile Octopus smart tariffs and told that the government will only pay for off-peak usage.
What does Greg Jackson expect? NESO is saying to the gas operators, "No, we don't want your dirty power, we don't want your dirty power, we don't... oops, we need your power, we're desperate, how much money do you want?".
It would, of course, be much cheaper to let the gas operators run at a substantial output 24/7 but that would involve being heretical towards our new religion.
I was saying long before the election that the new Labour government would only last until the first blackout. We may soon find out if I was right.
The only time NESO have any say is if they have to reorganise, add or curtail dispatch in the Balancing Mechanism or if they conduct specific trades in anticipation of a difficult period (used to include instructing coal to warm up just in case for instance). Otherwise, dispatch is left to the effects of subsidies to guarantee that renewables get to sell what they can produce, with CCGT incentivised to buy from wind farms to supply sales they made earlier and sell back any gas they bought ahead of time to match to make a bigger profit than if they just stuck to generating what they sold ahead of time.
They weren't planning to generate maybe deliberately so would have potentially had to buy the gas they needed on the open mkt as its not stored at a CCGT site unlike coal stations.
Indeed. But the highest NBP trade recorded for the system price was only 4.55p/kWh. Rye House were pricing against demand destruction in a market with no alternative supply.
Yes. Power generation stations are capital intensive endeavours, you have to amortize the costs and give a return to investors. The variable costs are dwarfed by the fixed costs.
Someones doesn't even need to understand the physics of power generation and distribution to see it, this is economics 101
May I send you my own recent analysis of what is required if an all-alternative energy option is achieved WITHOUT having carbon fuel backup? Things can end up MUCH worse than this, and COSTS will be quite high, whether or whether not there is a large scale carbon backup. With too little storage backup, there will be huge problems and costs such as described here, and with suitable storage backup, the capital costs are huge. I have numbers. I am NOT a paid subscriber. May I still submit? William T. Lynch PhD
No way the MOD POD can compete with the Rossi E-Cat. Give it up. Rossi will build an E-Cat powered monster truck that will roll over your little operation and crush it into rubble:
"....Leonardo Corporation introduced the NGU Power Cell at a public demonstration on September 27th, 2024 at Latina Italy where an E-Cat-powered electric vehicle with a normal range of 75 km on a single charge, drove for over 6 hours for a distance of 201 km. During this time the state of charge of the battery increased from 62 per cent to 83 per cent. Video of this event can be seen at https://youtube.com/@ecatthenewfire..."
Well, of course, I absolutely agree. Latent or potential energy. however, has no relationship to existing power levels, and so existing power levels can be increased, and temperatures measured in that medium can increase. Carbon has been the major source (other than slavery) for an increased supply of energy for millennia. I am concerned with the unaffordable dollar costs of alternative energies and on the huge quantity of batteries that are required if we attempt to depend only on wind and solar. WTL
Comment from NESO here
https://www.neso.energy/news/what-happened-margins-8-january
See the article coming on Sunday. In short, the NESO docs are BS.
Post mortem analysis shows that Langage and Peterhead did not in fact suffer trips. The LCP Delta alert feed seems to have been misled (and indeed started repeating old messages about LOLP).
Both did make some rather odd nominations of Maximum Export Limit during the day that were inconsistent with their output nominations called Final Physical Nomination. See the green line compared with the purple one here
https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/balancing-mechanism-bmu-view?bmuId=T_LAGA-1&activeTab=Physical&startDate=2025-01-08T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&endDate=2025-01-09T00%3A00%3A00.000Z
and here
https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/balancing-mechanism-bmu-view?bmuId=T_PEHE-1&activeTab=Physical&startDate=2025-01-08T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&endDate=2025-01-09T00%3A00%3A00.000Z
Thx for posting. I had raked through REMIT myself to find those and decided someone of LCPs status must have access to some other data source us mere mortals can't see!!
I've actually seen these erroneous trip messages before on LCP Enact.
Thanks for that. Added update to the main text.
Octopus secured a bid for £900/MWh to provide about 90MW of DFS over the hour from 5p.m. while paying customers 72p/kWh and taking 18p/kWh to cover their own administrative costs and profit. Such a low volume is never going to save the grid. The thing is, when they were being paid £5-6,000/MWh customer uptake nationally was not a whole lot higher than the maximum of 184MW in the recent event. NESO paid a maximum of £1,200/MWh for DFS, accepting every offer except for a tiny volume offered at £1,290/MWh at 4p.m. when supply was less tight.
At the moment NESO have decided to downgrade DFS because it is basically next to useless. Quite how we will get to 10GW of using electricity flexibly, Albert, as dreamt for CP2030, remains to be seen. Naked power cuts must be favourite.
I keep my Gridwatch app at the ready to capture looming blackout situations (so easy on my Samsung, just wave the side of the hand across the screen to take a “photo”). At 10am this morning UK demand stood at 44.74 GW (slightly higher than NESO’s supposed winter max of 44.4), wind was at 7%, solar zero.
They say the wind is going to fall later today and my local forecast is for -7°C at 5pm. Could this be it?!
Maybe. Enact showing 0% LOLP though. Maybe they've persuaded some big users to turn down or turn off their operations.
https://enact.lcp.energy/
This illustrates perfectly the point that I have made several times. The use of renewables will always require ongoing duplicative capital investments in gas/nuclear for backup when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. That alone explains why renewables can never deliver reduced household energy bills.
But on top of that (and of course The Guardian entirely misses the point) because these duplicate investments ARE only backups, it means that then they are needed to supply power the prices, of necessity, will be much higher to offset the idle time and make the investment viable. Otherwise, why would anyone undertake such investments?
Sadly, it’s the same everywhere, shutting down low cost baseload power plants and replacing them with moonbeams and unicorn farts, and tripling consumer electricity bills. It’s happening all over Europe, in the US and in Canada.
"It's all about the wind droughts, stupid!"
Its just a shame that the meteorologists didn't warn us and the policy planners didn't check.
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/The_endless_wind_drought_crippling_renewables___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf
Consequently trillions have been spent worldwide to get more expensive and less reliable energy with massive damage to the planet.
I don't expect the mainstream media to pick this up but I am surprised that conservative journalists and commentators have not told people about it.
A careful look at the chart from the Daily Mail article will show that, over the last 3 years or so, the increase in wind and solar has been mostly offset by the decline in nuclear generation. The total amount of clean energy generation shows very little change, the decline in gas and coal use has been replaced mostly by an increase in imports.
Relying on imports when neighbouring countries are also relying on wind and solar is not "security of supply"
Besides that they rely on dirty biomass burning to supply the reliable part of their scam - I mean plan, which they officially declare to be "carbon neutral". Whereas the EIA puts biomass power at 1400 gms/kwh vs 1100 gms/kwh for bituminous coal, in conventional coal burners. Why not just officially declare gas to be "carbon neutral" and then they can really brag about how green they are.
The point is that wind and solar deliver next to nothing at night when there is little or no wind and so there is absolutely no point at all in building more capacity. That's just about the end of the story.
On a point of detail, talking about clean energy is unhelpful because it implies that CO2, the breath of life, is a pollutant.
That is the foundational lie that drives the alarmist scam and the net zero Ponzi and casual references to clean energy help to perpetuate it.
Milliband is an easy target. He's a very left wing politician, he can't manage a bacon sandwich, he became leader of the Labour party through union machinations that permanently alienated his more capable brother. And there's the Ed Stone. But he's not an idiot. Why then will he not see what is plain to everybody?
Unless 'everybody' is all those people he's not friends with, has no interest in, and who don't go to those fashionable north London dinner parties. About 68m people at last count.
Thank you David! I'm not the first today to ask the first question on my list:
1) Are those now in charge agents of a hostile foreign power?
2) If so, which?
2) If not, how can we tell the difference?
I'm afraid only blackouts and a crisis will wake folk up. There will be many lies told, but we can hope the truth will emerge - power lines shorted by bullshit.
They are all minions of the Central Bank Cartel that pretty much runs the Western World, based in Basel, Switzerland. And they are the original Club of Rome Malthusian, Misanthropes, basically hate humanity, ascribe to some Doomer, DeGrowth, Deindustrialization cult code. And are trying to complete a century old dream of theirs of World Government, a neo-feudal, centralized, top-down oligarchy. And a scarcity economy is an important part of their strategy.
"We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest"
Paul Warburg, the International Banker testifying to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1950
Depopulation: "I Hope It Can Occur In a Civil Manner"
"The World can support something like a billion people, maybe two billion"
" I know in one way or another it's going to come back down so I don't hope to avoid that, I hope that it can occur in a civil way "
(i.e. Plandemic and deadly forced vaccines):
Club of Rome former director Dennis Meadows
https://rumble.com/v14uz0z-depopulation-i-hope-it-can-occur-in-a-civil-manner-club-of-romes-dennis-mea.html
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto determination practiced in past centuries.”
David Rockefeller in an address to a Trilateral Commission meeting in June of 1991
“This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long – We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”
David Rockefeller, Club of Rome, Sept. 23, 1994
“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will.
If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
from David Rockefeller’s autobiography ‘Memoirs’
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) president Philip Mountbatten who stated in a 1981 interview with People magazine:
“Human population growth is probably the single most serious long-term threat to survival. We’re in for a major disaster if it isn’t curbed—not just for the natural world, but for the human world. The more people there are, the more resources they’ll consume, the more pollution they’ll create, the more fighting they’ll do. We have no option. If it isn’t controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily.”..."
" Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it. "
Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
" The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet. "
Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
" Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. "
Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
I agree that only blackouts will wake people up to the situation they are in. A near blackout doesn't matter because only a tiny fraction of the population will even know it happened. I just hope the blackouts happen somewhere other than where I live!
What really depresses me, living in Brasil, is knowing that our Lula government is going fast downhill into the green energy scam even when just looking at Germany, the UK, California and South Australia shows how bad things can get.
But at least those countries are developed countries, I hope their people will see the light soon, and they will correct course in time.
But here for us in Brazil, desperatelly in need of economic growth and productivity increases, this will be a fatal blow that I am not sure we will be able to recover from.
What Greg Jackson conveniently fails to mention on his tweet is what Demand Flexibility Service means in reality: Disconnect consumers to reduce demand. Kind of a "voluntary" blackout.
They aren't actually disconnected. Their use over the half hourly periods they sign up for is compared against "normal", and they get paid for any apparent reduction.
Probably no other way of doing it but hardly guarantees what level of reduction your going to achieve which i why guess previously they made it very enticing but now the rate has been massively dropped its not going to alter behaviour.
At least until appliances can be centrally controlled, which is already here for EV chargers, which by law must gave such facilities included, although the user us for now allowed to overrule them (but the cost will be high for doing so).
The thing is that when they offered £5-6,000/MWh the take-up was really very limited at under 300MW. Cheaper to use Rye House. In any event, there was significant gaming of the system with people purposely inflating use during the reference period in order to maximise apparent saving. DFS is not going to save the system: only compulsory reductions can do that.
Demand Flexibility is another name for Electricity rationing.
That's the word I was looking for! thank you!
The two generators that provided backup at the last minute were apparently not available for use, for whatever reason, during the day. So they were actually paid a fortune to respond to the shortage that they had contributed to in the first place. Just bad luckfor us and good luck for them, or something more sinister we will never know! It might have been better to turn down their vastly over-priced offer and let Ed Miliband see what happens when a lack wind and solar coincides with high demand, as it will many times in the future. Meanwhile we in Wales are being told we need Bute Energy to cover the countryside in turbines and concrete because we need more wind for cheap electricity. You couldn't make it up!!
Thats incorrect Rye Hse ran in the morning peak and was scheduled to come off at lunchtime but NESO then instructed them all afternoon to hold at 410MW.
Connahs Quay-3 also had the same schedule and NESO constantly instructed them all afternoon as well.
They got rid of them when Viking link came back upto full power by the looks of it.
Those operators may have deliberately adopted this schedule in anticipation of an opportunity who knows but the bottom line is the drive to push baseload generators off the system is creating these sort of opportunities.
Interesting the mkt went completely the opposite way this afternoon and system price came nowhere near the day ahead price despite similar conditions in play.
The Telegraph and Octopus need correcting:
http://web.archive.org/web/20250111142815/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/10/traders-making-millions-gaming-britains-power-crunch/
Why are the telegraph letting Octopus inform their journalists is beyond me in the first place.
Journalists will happily quote people with a public profile. These days few if them have the expertise to tease out the truth, especially if their editors prefer propaganda.
That makes sense. Maybe I misunderstood the information I was given, or the information was incorrect. I apologise anyway, I didn't intend to mislead anyone. Thank you for putting me right. I will be interested to see how these scenarios play out in the future.
The Guardian made them out to be bad boys but the system acted as it should. A CMN was issued which requires all generators operational to make themselves available and they did. They maybe gaming the system but media really dont understand the system. Rye House isn't a high volume generator so that suggests to me it has no long term contracts so its probably making itself available in the day ahead mkt. This means its buying gas on the spot mkt as well and that was getting pricey on the 8th after midday so its offer were probably already too high and suppliers either went elsewhere or decided to take their chances in the BM. Then come the day of the races and a couple of outages and higher forecast demand than expected left NESO with limited options to keep the lights on. The price of gas was probably even higher on the day so Rye Hse price/MWh reflects that.
In the grand scheme of things it will be smoothed out over a year when majority of prices are made at the long run average. If the Guardian were that bothered they would be raising the fact that NESO spent 320m in December on balancing the system and 90% of that was down to transmission constraints. The hobby horse they should be pedalling is the Nimbys that prevent transmission lines being built and the useless OFGEM that is supposed to act in the interest of consumers but has failed to do so. Millibrain and Starkie should have fixed these issues first not just doubled down more like tripled down on the flawed system that already exists.
The price of gas averaged 4.2p/kWh on 8th January. There were no supply worries although 1.1TWh was drawn down from storage.
This whole situation quite certainly tempts certain generating stations to be unavailable when it is most convenient to them, and suddenly be ready to produce when they get offered a nice amount of money. Doesn’t seem like a far fetched hypothesis to me…
Oh dear, 46.8GW peak demand when they were only anticipating 44.4. That's quite a difference. I wonder why. Maybe all those hotels across the country hosting residents who are not used to our chilly British weather should be put on mandatory Agile Octopus smart tariffs and told that the government will only pay for off-peak usage.
What does Greg Jackson expect? NESO is saying to the gas operators, "No, we don't want your dirty power, we don't want your dirty power, we don't... oops, we need your power, we're desperate, how much money do you want?".
It would, of course, be much cheaper to let the gas operators run at a substantial output 24/7 but that would involve being heretical towards our new religion.
I was saying long before the election that the new Labour government would only last until the first blackout. We may soon find out if I was right.
The only time NESO have any say is if they have to reorganise, add or curtail dispatch in the Balancing Mechanism or if they conduct specific trades in anticipation of a difficult period (used to include instructing coal to warm up just in case for instance). Otherwise, dispatch is left to the effects of subsidies to guarantee that renewables get to sell what they can produce, with CCGT incentivised to buy from wind farms to supply sales they made earlier and sell back any gas they bought ahead of time to match to make a bigger profit than if they just stuck to generating what they sold ahead of time.
They weren't planning to generate maybe deliberately so would have potentially had to buy the gas they needed on the open mkt as its not stored at a CCGT site unlike coal stations.
Indeed. But the highest NBP trade recorded for the system price was only 4.55p/kWh. Rye House were pricing against demand destruction in a market with no alternative supply.
Yes. Power generation stations are capital intensive endeavours, you have to amortize the costs and give a return to investors. The variable costs are dwarfed by the fixed costs.
Someones doesn't even need to understand the physics of power generation and distribution to see it, this is economics 101
May I send you my own recent analysis of what is required if an all-alternative energy option is achieved WITHOUT having carbon fuel backup? Things can end up MUCH worse than this, and COSTS will be quite high, whether or whether not there is a large scale carbon backup. With too little storage backup, there will be huge problems and costs such as described here, and with suitable storage backup, the capital costs are huge. I have numbers. I am NOT a paid subscriber. May I still submit? William T. Lynch PhD
By all means, send me a DM with a link. You may recall I had a go at costing the RS report from 2023:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/lcoe-cost-wind-solar-renewables-plus-hydrogen?utm_source=publication-search
No way the MOD POD can compete with the Rossi E-Cat. Give it up. Rossi will build an E-Cat powered monster truck that will roll over your little operation and crush it into rubble:
"....Leonardo Corporation introduced the NGU Power Cell at a public demonstration on September 27th, 2024 at Latina Italy where an E-Cat-powered electric vehicle with a normal range of 75 km on a single charge, drove for over 6 hours for a distance of 201 km. During this time the state of charge of the battery increased from 62 per cent to 83 per cent. Video of this event can be seen at https://youtube.com/@ecatthenewfire..."
Well, of course, I absolutely agree. Latent or potential energy. however, has no relationship to existing power levels, and so existing power levels can be increased, and temperatures measured in that medium can increase. Carbon has been the major source (other than slavery) for an increased supply of energy for millennia. I am concerned with the unaffordable dollar costs of alternative energies and on the huge quantity of batteries that are required if we attempt to depend only on wind and solar. WTL