In order for NESO to have operated within their legally required margins on the 8th Jan, should they have reduced demand? Obviously this would have resulted in some power outages. I understand that the supply/demand margin should be equal to the largest generating asset supplying the grid at any given time. This protects the grid from total failure should that asset fail.
Question is, if demand reduction should have been deployed on the 8th who made the decision to place the entire network at risk. Power outages would be politically suboptimal, but total grid failure would be catastrophic. Did our leaders make this call for political protection?
Thank you for this exposé of NESO wishful thinking.
The recent name change from National Grid to NESO tells us all we need to know - coming sooner or later to blackout near you and to be known thereafter as No Electricity Sod Off.
Sounds like trouble ahead, as soon as some really bad weather hits. But I'll ask a stupid question: What's NESO? I hate acronyms that are not explained in the beginning. Since I'm an American, I thought maybe it was some power company in New England. But when interconnections to Ireland and some European countries were mentioned, I realized it was probably some power company or power system or organization in the UK. Also that became apparent as soon as I got to the comments.
A few years ago I looked at the WInter Outlook, criticising the use of average annual generation to meet ACS demand - since there is a correlation between cold weather and still weather, I felt a more conservative measure was warranted. If you get to 1% of wind output you easily wipe out the 5 GW spare margin at the time.
I discussed this with Fintan Slye who said if they followed my suggestion it would be overly conservative. He also said that the Outlook is purely used for communication with the market and that LOLP is what is used operationally. Which is just as well, but I'm not sure that's going particularly well either!
To Mr. Turver -- It's too bad that your new Labour Government leadership has refused a solid-state power supply - that could fix the problem they inherited.
IT sure looks like they are hell bent on increasing the cost to everyone - while increasing "all those profits".
Sufre looks like the "tail is wagging the dog" on this one.
The “climate change” hoax/conspiracy is entirely founded on lies so it’s only to be expected that all its practitioners lie and cheat. In his recent Unherd interview of Kathryn Porter, near the end Freddie Sayers bravely says the unsayable when he compares the deceptions and chicaneries surrounding energy policies with the deceptions and chicaneries surrounding Covid. Sadly but unsurprisingly, Kathryn plays it straight.
Kathryn is an energy expert with a degree in physics and a career in the energy industry. By being consistently accurate and on topic she has built up a considerable media profile that is an invaluable asset in getting criticism of net zero policies into public discussion. It would be a mistake to throw that away by offering critics the scope to divert discussion by calling her out on other issues even unjustifiably.
It is much better to promote real experts in their fields on particular issues: they will have far more credibility than a layperson, and be well prepared to demonstrate the follies of politicians, quangocrats and general MSM reporters. It can be hard enough for such experts to get their messages across: see for example the Barrington Declaration.
Except that data massaging and vagueries are a general scientific phenomenon. You don't even have to be a scientist or engineer to understand having appropriate tools for a job.
Playing just to experts is a fallacy that the Ancient Greeks figured out was just that. Why does it still take people today this long to work it out?
The Covid nonsense was relevant because decisions were being made on changes to theoretical data because in reality there was no such crisis. Models in more models out leading to bad real world consequences. Exactly the same as in climate change data. If the data is actually checked and audited you can see the limitations.
And furthermore, we demand such attention to detail on other aspects of our lives from water safety to aircraft safety (hello Boeing). But for some reason when it's a government program of dubious quality all these principles and measures go out the window in favour of industrial strength gaslighting.
Things are tight tonight and tomorrow in the evening peak but no margin notice as enough generators available and i/c's all on line except BritNed which is on a planned outage.
Obfuscation is the name of the game. The outlook reports have IMHO. deteriorated in the past couple of years, the derated capacity of wind being iirc lower than it once was being the only notable improvement. The report is certainly less ‘technical’ than it once was.
One thing that really bugs me is the ability for non-dispatchable weather dependent sources, both solar & wind to be paid by the capacity market.
This all needs to be exposed and explained to the general public.
However, it is a secondary problem along with everything else that is going wrong, like the cost of power and the problem of maintaining stability in the voltage and frequency of the current.
The fundamental problem, the Original Sin you might say, was the failure of the meteorologists to tell us about wind droughts/Dunkelflautes and the failure of the architects of the transition to plan for the worst case scenario in the wind supply, namely low winds for several days in succession or even weeks.
These two failures demand an explanation.
Everything else that is going wrong follows as night follows day from the original blunders, but I do not see this being clearly explained, even by conservative commentators who should be the first and most outspoken about it.
Nothing can improve as long as the subsidies and mandates for unreliable energy are in place.
My take on this paper is that Australian meteorologists used average wind speeds when assessing wind power output and did not identify low wind flow periods which obviously need to be back-filled by other sources. It is easy to see how this was done if their expertise was meteorology which uses huge datasets to atmospheric activity long term rather than wind power production which has a focus on contingency and safe fail-overs.
Did UK meteorologists do the same thing. It would be better to know now and take any necessary remedial action rather than discover an analysis error after a major outage
In reality I suspect only the engineers operating the system will know how close we came to exceeding capacity and the lights starting to go out. I bet there was major stress in the control centre as ultimately the power for the whole country would have been in the hands of a few people. It would make for a good documentary.
A sort of UK Chernobyl. As I'm sure many do not realise, when the lights go out, how many Hospitals will cope, even their Blood Pressure kit is electric!
The power for the whole country is always in the hands of a few people, the general public have no idea how their lifestyles rely on a small group of engineers,
I heard a story a few years ago that a shift was refused permission to go on a team building away day because if anything happened there wouldn’t be enough people to manage the system.
I do not understand why NESO are not opposing government plans for renewables and the closure of dispatchable plants as being unworkable and pointing out the very real risks of this policy.
If or rather when there is a significant trip of the grid, who will be blamed, I would say that NESO will get a lot if not all of the critisism. Perhaps they are telling government and we don't know but from my perspective they are not being strong enough. If they are being overruled by government shouldn't they, in their own interest, make that publically known?
Shortly after posting this I came across this from someone commenting on the Prison Service
I left the prison service from HMP Dartmoor after having had enough of a corporate organisation that rewarded incompetence, mendacity & cowardice in return for slavish devotion to the party line.
I've met quite a lot of the NESO staff at FES planning events. It is obvious the upper echelons of NESO have all been guzzling on the Kool-Aid. They're probably marginalising the proper engineers.
There are already a number of FOIs that have been submitted by some of the journalists reporting the story. Doubtless the responses will be delayed as long as possible.
Interesting. How specific are the requests? I'd imagine a time bound communications with government relating to this issue of the report might be specific enough? But maybe I'm naive as I haven't submitted any before.
Good idea as government owned body now they can't easily refuse but ive done it for lesser things with other public bodies and they just prevaricate or just recycle previously published information when they really don't want to reveal their hand.
Thank you David! So nought for our comfort: NESO is doing the equivalent of flying low in cloud with a dodgy altimeter. Thank you for picking apart their story. I'd have preferred "we had a careful look and found a couple of gas-fired power stations we'd forgotten we had".
As an aside, readers of this substack might wish to view this Youtube video from the Institute of Economic Affairs 'Are we Wasting BILLIONS on Net Zero?' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaGKZlV0bHI No surprises but I find it a fair and concise summary of where we are and what might be done.
I looked at the BMU data for settlement period 1600/1630 for the 8th my interpretation was that these CCGTs: Didcot B5, Enfield, Fawley, Keadby 2, Little Barford were on planned or unplanned outage. This left Connahs Quay 1-3, Rye Hse, Sutton Bri & Brigg sitting on the sidelines. The first three (5 sets) were instructed in the BM but not upto MEL. Brigg left itself unavailable maybe has no cap mkt contract.
So my take was against declared MEL (Max Export Limits) they had 400MW on hand with Sutton Bridge and another 330MW from Connahs Quay1-3. With Rye Hse they were trying to remove it from mid afternoon (at 5k/MWh it was screwing the system price) but it always had an additional 270MW available above its SEL (stable operating level) of 410MW. So my take is there was a 1GW of CCGT capacity available.
Then they also had 220MW of the old Rolls Royce RB211 powered OCGTs that the CEGB installed at the old coal stns in hand which are in the BM and weren't instructed on so were available.
So thats c1.2GW of plant that could have been accessed albeit it still takes time to get it run upto full power which is why they have Quick Reserve to buy them that time and then the dynamic suites to deal with the first couple of mins.
Im not an expert here vs Kathryn and others and just extracting the datasets and trying to interpret them. However, to my mind what the events of the 8th show is that without the i/c's we would have been plain screwed as there is no way we could have replaced them with dispatchable generation. How Millibrain can say we have energy security is beyond me and this should e majored upon.
The peak demand on the grid was at approximately 17:20. I downloaded the complete dataset for Maximum Export Limits for settlement periods 34-37 inclusive and helped Kathryn analyse the data to be sure nothing was double counted, and then excluded non dispatchable generation (wind, solar, interconnectors) for which actual generation was the effective MEL. We also looked at the provision of STOR that is meant to be kept back in case there is a need for a rapid response following a major trip. Out of 848MW contracted by auction some 599MW was used during SP35. See her blog for more.
I now have the technique to look at the MEL minute by minute, since units do change their levels sometimes on short timescales.
The co located OCGT’s from CEGB days are now mostly gone, mainly because the parent stations and no longer exist and transmission entry capacity (TEC) isn’t contracted for. At several (many?) sites they have reduced the number of GT’s, Ferrybridge C for instance operated since the late 1990’s with only two out of four 17.5MW units available. Drax is down to iirc three 35MW units from the six at privatisation.
Didcot A (the old coal station) still has 100MW of TEC, and there is TEC at the CEGB standalone sites: Cowes 140MW & Taylors Lane 140MW although these may have been replanted. Lister Drive in Liverpool was also another standalone GT site again iirc 140MW but has long since gone.
The CEGB OCGT’s were distillate fuelled (kerosine/heating oil) rather than natural gas, generally sized as 17.5MW Bristol Siddeleys, 28MW twin RR Avons & 35MW RR Olympus, all long predating the RB211’s which have since been used offshore and elsewhere in the world for power generation and gas compressors. Drax completion in the early 1980’s still installed the exact same 35MW RR Olympus units as were used in the first half a decade earlier.
Other OCGT’s exist, either as new builds or as conversions of CCGT’s and these are generally natural gas fired
In order for NESO to have operated within their legally required margins on the 8th Jan, should they have reduced demand? Obviously this would have resulted in some power outages. I understand that the supply/demand margin should be equal to the largest generating asset supplying the grid at any given time. This protects the grid from total failure should that asset fail.
Question is, if demand reduction should have been deployed on the 8th who made the decision to place the entire network at risk. Power outages would be politically suboptimal, but total grid failure would be catastrophic. Did our leaders make this call for political protection?
Thank you for this exposé of NESO wishful thinking.
The recent name change from National Grid to NESO tells us all we need to know - coming sooner or later to blackout near you and to be known thereafter as No Electricity Sod Off.
Sounds like trouble ahead, as soon as some really bad weather hits. But I'll ask a stupid question: What's NESO? I hate acronyms that are not explained in the beginning. Since I'm an American, I thought maybe it was some power company in New England. But when interconnections to Ireland and some European countries were mentioned, I realized it was probably some power company or power system or organization in the UK. Also that became apparent as soon as I got to the comments.
Greetings Al: it's National Energy System Operator - David amended the article to clarify this. However, I think it will become No Energy - Sold Out.
Thanks.
Thanks for the links to my blog!
A few years ago I looked at the WInter Outlook, criticising the use of average annual generation to meet ACS demand - since there is a correlation between cold weather and still weather, I felt a more conservative measure was warranted. If you get to 1% of wind output you easily wipe out the 5 GW spare margin at the time.
I discussed this with Fintan Slye who said if they followed my suggestion it would be overly conservative. He also said that the Outlook is purely used for communication with the market and that LOLP is what is used operationally. Which is just as well, but I'm not sure that's going particularly well either!
To Mr. Turver -- It's too bad that your new Labour Government leadership has refused a solid-state power supply - that could fix the problem they inherited.
IT sure looks like they are hell bent on increasing the cost to everyone - while increasing "all those profits".
Sufre looks like the "tail is wagging the dog" on this one.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard P. Feynman
Two possibilities:
1. You're wrong, and 2. NESO is wrong.
If 1., all rollover and go back to sleep.
If 2., wake up pretty damn fast.
The “climate change” hoax/conspiracy is entirely founded on lies so it’s only to be expected that all its practitioners lie and cheat. In his recent Unherd interview of Kathryn Porter, near the end Freddie Sayers bravely says the unsayable when he compares the deceptions and chicaneries surrounding energy policies with the deceptions and chicaneries surrounding Covid. Sadly but unsurprisingly, Kathryn plays it straight.
Kathryn is an energy expert with a degree in physics and a career in the energy industry. By being consistently accurate and on topic she has built up a considerable media profile that is an invaluable asset in getting criticism of net zero policies into public discussion. It would be a mistake to throw that away by offering critics the scope to divert discussion by calling her out on other issues even unjustifiably.
It is much better to promote real experts in their fields on particular issues: they will have far more credibility than a layperson, and be well prepared to demonstrate the follies of politicians, quangocrats and general MSM reporters. It can be hard enough for such experts to get their messages across: see for example the Barrington Declaration.
Except that data massaging and vagueries are a general scientific phenomenon. You don't even have to be a scientist or engineer to understand having appropriate tools for a job.
Playing just to experts is a fallacy that the Ancient Greeks figured out was just that. Why does it still take people today this long to work it out?
The Covid nonsense was relevant because decisions were being made on changes to theoretical data because in reality there was no such crisis. Models in more models out leading to bad real world consequences. Exactly the same as in climate change data. If the data is actually checked and audited you can see the limitations.
And furthermore, we demand such attention to detail on other aspects of our lives from water safety to aircraft safety (hello Boeing). But for some reason when it's a government program of dubious quality all these principles and measures go out the window in favour of industrial strength gaslighting.
How predictable are dunkelflautes?
If NESO had more warning could they “find” more generators?
When is the next margin call likely?
What would happen if we had another winter like 1963?
Things are tight tonight and tomorrow in the evening peak but no margin notice as enough generators available and i/c's all on line except BritNed which is on a planned outage.
We will have the same problems in Australia because our energy czar, the CEO of our equivalent to your NESO, learned his trade in Britain.
That is Daniel "Wally" Westerman.
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/Meet_Daniel_Westerman.pdf
We think of him like the character in "Where's Wally?"
Obfuscation is the name of the game. The outlook reports have IMHO. deteriorated in the past couple of years, the derated capacity of wind being iirc lower than it once was being the only notable improvement. The report is certainly less ‘technical’ than it once was.
One thing that really bugs me is the ability for non-dispatchable weather dependent sources, both solar & wind to be paid by the capacity market.
That certainly warrants closer inspection.
This all needs to be exposed and explained to the general public.
However, it is a secondary problem along with everything else that is going wrong, like the cost of power and the problem of maintaining stability in the voltage and frequency of the current.
The fundamental problem, the Original Sin you might say, was the failure of the meteorologists to tell us about wind droughts/Dunkelflautes and the failure of the architects of the transition to plan for the worst case scenario in the wind supply, namely low winds for several days in succession or even weeks.
These two failures demand an explanation.
Everything else that is going wrong follows as night follows day from the original blunders, but I do not see this being clearly explained, even by conservative commentators who should be the first and most outspoken about it.
Nothing can improve as long as the subsidies and mandates for unreliable energy are in place.
Fix that or die!
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/The_endless_wind_drought_crippling_renewables___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf
My take on this paper is that Australian meteorologists used average wind speeds when assessing wind power output and did not identify low wind flow periods which obviously need to be back-filled by other sources. It is easy to see how this was done if their expertise was meteorology which uses huge datasets to atmospheric activity long term rather than wind power production which has a focus on contingency and safe fail-overs.
Did UK meteorologists do the same thing. It would be better to know now and take any necessary remedial action rather than discover an analysis error after a major outage
Thank you, David. You and Kathryn Porter are doing a great public service.
In reality I suspect only the engineers operating the system will know how close we came to exceeding capacity and the lights starting to go out. I bet there was major stress in the control centre as ultimately the power for the whole country would have been in the hands of a few people. It would make for a good documentary.
A sort of UK Chernobyl. As I'm sure many do not realise, when the lights go out, how many Hospitals will cope, even their Blood Pressure kit is electric!
The power for the whole country is always in the hands of a few people, the general public have no idea how their lifestyles rely on a small group of engineers,
I heard a story a few years ago that a shift was refused permission to go on a team building away day because if anything happened there wouldn’t be enough people to manage the system.
Not that their salaries reflect this....
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/grid-at-work-stories/pandemic-volunteers-return-home
They even lived in on site during the pandemic...
I have made this point elsewhere.
I do not understand why NESO are not opposing government plans for renewables and the closure of dispatchable plants as being unworkable and pointing out the very real risks of this policy.
If or rather when there is a significant trip of the grid, who will be blamed, I would say that NESO will get a lot if not all of the critisism. Perhaps they are telling government and we don't know but from my perspective they are not being strong enough. If they are being overruled by government shouldn't they, in their own interest, make that publically known?
Does anyone have any knowledge of this matter?
I suspect that's a topic for another Substack - How to get promoted in a large organisation without any talent.
Start with the Psychology of Military Incompetence and have the Post Office in mind as you read it
Shortly after posting this I came across this from someone commenting on the Prison Service
I left the prison service from HMP Dartmoor after having had enough of a corporate organisation that rewarded incompetence, mendacity & cowardice in return for slavish devotion to the party line.
I've met quite a lot of the NESO staff at FES planning events. It is obvious the upper echelons of NESO have all been guzzling on the Kool-Aid. They're probably marginalising the proper engineers.
Maybe it needs a FOIA request?
There are already a number of FOIs that have been submitted by some of the journalists reporting the story. Doubtless the responses will be delayed as long as possible.
Interesting. How specific are the requests? I'd imagine a time bound communications with government relating to this issue of the report might be specific enough? But maybe I'm naive as I haven't submitted any before.
Good idea as government owned body now they can't easily refuse but ive done it for lesser things with other public bodies and they just prevaricate or just recycle previously published information when they really don't want to reveal their hand.
Thank you David! So nought for our comfort: NESO is doing the equivalent of flying low in cloud with a dodgy altimeter. Thank you for picking apart their story. I'd have preferred "we had a careful look and found a couple of gas-fired power stations we'd forgotten we had".
As an aside, readers of this substack might wish to view this Youtube video from the Institute of Economic Affairs 'Are we Wasting BILLIONS on Net Zero?' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaGKZlV0bHI No surprises but I find it a fair and concise summary of where we are and what might be done.
I looked at the BMU data for settlement period 1600/1630 for the 8th my interpretation was that these CCGTs: Didcot B5, Enfield, Fawley, Keadby 2, Little Barford were on planned or unplanned outage. This left Connahs Quay 1-3, Rye Hse, Sutton Bri & Brigg sitting on the sidelines. The first three (5 sets) were instructed in the BM but not upto MEL. Brigg left itself unavailable maybe has no cap mkt contract.
So my take was against declared MEL (Max Export Limits) they had 400MW on hand with Sutton Bridge and another 330MW from Connahs Quay1-3. With Rye Hse they were trying to remove it from mid afternoon (at 5k/MWh it was screwing the system price) but it always had an additional 270MW available above its SEL (stable operating level) of 410MW. So my take is there was a 1GW of CCGT capacity available.
Then they also had 220MW of the old Rolls Royce RB211 powered OCGTs that the CEGB installed at the old coal stns in hand which are in the BM and weren't instructed on so were available.
So thats c1.2GW of plant that could have been accessed albeit it still takes time to get it run upto full power which is why they have Quick Reserve to buy them that time and then the dynamic suites to deal with the first couple of mins.
Im not an expert here vs Kathryn and others and just extracting the datasets and trying to interpret them. However, to my mind what the events of the 8th show is that without the i/c's we would have been plain screwed as there is no way we could have replaced them with dispatchable generation. How Millibrain can say we have energy security is beyond me and this should e majored upon.
The peak demand on the grid was at approximately 17:20. I downloaded the complete dataset for Maximum Export Limits for settlement periods 34-37 inclusive and helped Kathryn analyse the data to be sure nothing was double counted, and then excluded non dispatchable generation (wind, solar, interconnectors) for which actual generation was the effective MEL. We also looked at the provision of STOR that is meant to be kept back in case there is a need for a rapid response following a major trip. Out of 848MW contracted by auction some 599MW was used during SP35. See her blog for more.
I now have the technique to look at the MEL minute by minute, since units do change their levels sometimes on short timescales.
The co located OCGT’s from CEGB days are now mostly gone, mainly because the parent stations and no longer exist and transmission entry capacity (TEC) isn’t contracted for. At several (many?) sites they have reduced the number of GT’s, Ferrybridge C for instance operated since the late 1990’s with only two out of four 17.5MW units available. Drax is down to iirc three 35MW units from the six at privatisation.
Didcot A (the old coal station) still has 100MW of TEC, and there is TEC at the CEGB standalone sites: Cowes 140MW & Taylors Lane 140MW although these may have been replanted. Lister Drive in Liverpool was also another standalone GT site again iirc 140MW but has long since gone.
The CEGB OCGT’s were distillate fuelled (kerosine/heating oil) rather than natural gas, generally sized as 17.5MW Bristol Siddeleys, 28MW twin RR Avons & 35MW RR Olympus, all long predating the RB211’s which have since been used offshore and elsewhere in the world for power generation and gas compressors. Drax completion in the early 1980’s still installed the exact same 35MW RR Olympus units as were used in the first half a decade earlier.
Other OCGT’s exist, either as new builds or as conversions of CCGT’s and these are generally natural gas fired
https://www.neso.energy/data-portal/transmission-entry-capacity-tec-register
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66a7daa4fc8e12ac3edb068e/DUKES_5.11.xlsx
Inter-connectors = energy lifeline = sitting targets