By Christopher Booker We have recently been assailed with scary media stories, based on a somewhat alarmist reading of a report by our energy regulator Ofgem, that within a year or two Britain could face major power blackouts. Such predictions would hardly have been unfamiliar to readers of this column, since I have been warning of such a dire consequence of the mess successive governments have been making of our energy supplies since 2006. So why, then, when our new energy minister Michael Fallon is interviewed about this, is he so smilingly confident that such a disaster is not going to happen? The answer lies in a huge “secret weapon” the Government is adding to its armoury, which until now has almost entirely escaped general notice. It is true that, as we run down our conventional power sources through the closure of coal-fired power stations and our ageing nuclear reactors, the gap between our electricity supplies and the 60 gigawatts (GW) required at times of peak demand has become dangerously narrow. But the Government knows that the National Grid is quietly building up a hidden array of new power sources quite sufficient to keep our lights on and our computer-dependent economy running. There are three legs to this answer to the Government’s prayers. The first lies in the fact that there are thousands of hospitals and commercial and industrial concerns, such as banks, data centres and water companies, that have their own back-up generating facilities, largely powered by diesel. For some time, the grid has been signing up these operations to a scheme known as STOR (Short Term Operating Reserve), which, thanks to smart computer management, will enable it to call on them at very short notice to feed power into the grid. Those operators already signed up can supply 3.2GW to the grid, and this is estimated to rise within a few years to 8GW (estimates of the potential supply from such stand-by generators are between 20 and 30GW). Leg two of the scheme is that another 6GW is already available from thousands of CHP (combined heat and power) schemes, mainly gas-operated. A further 4GW could be made available, if the price were right, by recruiting those gas-fired power stations that have been “mothballed” because gas has become more expensive than coal, the price of which has plummeted thanks to the USA’s switch to using cheap gas from shale. All this adds up to 18GW or more of capacity that can be called on to ensure that Britain’s lights stay on — equivalent to that of all our remaining major coal-fired power stations. It also provides an answer to that other problem I have reported here for years: the need, as we install ever more ludicrously expensive and unreliable wind turbines, to provide instantly available back-up for all those times when the wind is not blowing. Although this may offer a clever solution to our shortage of conventional power supplies and the huge problems created by the erratic nature of wind power, it comes, of course, with a massive downside – the prospect of yet another dramatic rise in our already soaring electricity bills. These new power sources are far from cheap; the current wholesale cost of electricity is around £50 a megawatt hour (MWh). Thanks to the subsidies levied through our electricity bills, we are already paying nearly £100 per MWh to the owners of onshore wind farms and £150 for those offshore. But, as the National Grid reveals, the tender prices submitted by those signed up to the STOR scheme can be as high as £400 per MWh, eight times the market rate. The average payment in 2011 was £225 per MWh, plus a fee of £22,000 for every megawatt of their capacity (for these fees in 2010-11 alone we stumped up £75million). In other words, just when we are already facing a doubling of our electricity bills through “carbon taxes”, subsidies to renewables and the “strike price” demanded by energy companies as their price for building new nuclear power stations, we are now looking at another huge spike in our bills to pay for the electricity the Government plans to call on to cover that fast-looming gap in our energy supplies — created by the way its policy has been so disastrously skewed by our politicians’ obsession with global warming, and their fond belief that the earth’s climate could somehow be affected by Britain reducing its “carbon emissions” by four-fifths. The final irony, of course, is that we not only pay for their dreams through a further hike in our energy bills, but also those diesel generators emit almost as much CO2 as the coal-fired power stations the politicians would like to see eliminated. Not only will we be bankrupted by their idiocy. It won’t even help to “save the planet”, either.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 08:51:25 +0000
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