Ross Clark Ross Clark

Gone with the wind: why electricity shortages are becoming the norm

(Photo: iStock)

If it wasn’t miserable enough being told that I have to spend the next month at home, now I have ‘Pete’ from Octopus Energy emailing me and asking if I would mind terribly turning off a few appliances between 4.30pm and 6.30pm. If fact, he says, if I can halve my energy usage during those hours he’ll give me a half price deal on the rest. 

Apparently it’s because the National Grid has issued an ‘electricity margin notice’ for those hours – basically a plea for Britain’s remaining coal and gas power stations to turn up the power and squeeze a little more energy out of their plants. That’s not going to be easy, admits Pete, and so electricity companies like his are going to be paying through the nose for the power – ten times as much as normal, he says. Hence the plea for me to switch off the TV, or whatever.

That is a ‘smart’ electricity grid for you: balancing supply and demand through price management. And within reason there is nothing wrong with it. We do, after all, pay more for train tickets during the rush hour (or used to, when we travelled on trains). Trouble is, I don’t think Pete is going to be so gentle in future. Give it a few years and he’ll be writing to me telling me that he’ll be jacking up my bill and charging me ten times the usual price for any energy I use when supply is short.

We are heading for periodic supply crunches in the National Grid because we are building ever more wind and solar plants without the storage capacity required to cope with the intermittent nature of these sources of energy. At least, for the moment, we still have gas and coal plants to pick up the slack.

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