National Grid restores power for how long?
The UK electricity market has recovered from a troublesome shortage of supply on Tuesday, according to network operator National Grid. However, some analysts are seeing the problems, which included power cuts and reduced supply voltages, as a warning sign of more trouble to come
National Grid spokesman Stewart Larque described the sequence of events to UK magazine, The Register, yesterday. He said that the start of the problems came a little before midday on Tuesday, when two big power stations went offline unexpectedly, within "two minutes" of each other. Larque didn't specify, but it's now well known that these were the 1,000-megawatt Sizewell B nuclear station in Suffolk and the 2,400-megawatt Longannet coal station in Scotland.
The National Grid could offer no comment on the situation which had led it to ration power. Larque said that multiple power station shutdowns in one day was far from unknown, but nine in one day was "very unusual".
However, the number of failed stations may be largely irrelevant. It appears that some were sub-100-megawatt units like the South Humber one, fairly insignificant in the context of gigawatt stations like Sizewell and Longannet suddenly vanishing. Even Deeside was small by comparison. When the two large plants - though one notes they are by no means the biggest ones in the UK - unexpectedly went down, it seems that all the spare capacity available was only just enough to compensate, leaving nothing ready to deal with the evening demand surge, despite the Grid's increasingly desperate appeals to the market.
