Saturday, June 21, 2025

When You Have to Depend on the French or It’s Lights Out, You Must Be in England – HotAir

June 20, 2025
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When You Have to Depend on the French or It's Lights Out, You Must Be in England – HotAir
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The United Kingdom is circling the drain in so many ways, it’s hard to keep track…but we try.

Between giving chunks of the kingdom away (like Chagos), screwing over the parts they’re still sort of keeping…





…slamming Grannies in jail for mean Xweets, teenagers for flag waving, and banning housewives from ordering kitchen knives on Amazon while murdering, knife-wielding psychopaths from immigrant households are kept safe, things are more smashing than going smashingly.

And today, the benevolent Labour government made sure there are no measures attached so that depressed or bankrupt people can’t have themselves executed legally by the state to save the state money (David did the sad duty reporting on it here.)

‘Death by cake‘ was always a great Eddie Izzard routine. Who knew it might one day be real?

Shaping up to be a terrific place, and one that is also lurching, under the sway of Labour climate cultists drunk on power, into a self-induced energy catastrophe.

I covered how close they came to a near island-wide blackout back in January, as temperatures plunged, their much vaunted wind died away, and the two gas plants that did kick in to pick up the slack made  £12m for three hours of operation.





The other part of the problem that night caused by the extreme demand and brutal conditions?

The interconnector lines that the country relies on from the European continent experienced significant outages. The only thing that saved Britain from a blackout was being able to bring one of the interconnectors back online in the nick of time. And the fact that one of the gas plants didn’t trip while running at peak capacity.

There was no capacity to spare.

Yesterday saw a blackout near miss in what turned out to be the tightest day the GB electricity market has seen since 2011. Wind power was 2.5 GW through the evening peak, solar was (obviously) zero and there were significant interconnector outages leaving expected capacity at just 5.7 GW. Had just one large power station tripped this evening, demand control would have been a real prospect.

…The generation availability (data from Amira Technologies taken from BMRS) was 44.905 GW. Adding the expected wind generation of 2.5 GW, that gave 47.405 GW. The out-turn after adjustments in the BM was 46.628 GW which includes an additional 700 MW from the Viking interconnector which was able to return a bipole that was intended to be offline for maintenance.

However, there had been a bit of spare CCGT capacity – the availability was 26.007 GW, the out-turn before BM actions was 24.368 GW and after BM actions the out-turn was 23.230 GW. Some CCGTs, notably Rye House, were offered at such high price in the BM they were only partially accepted. Rye House ran at its Stable Export Limit rather than its Maximum Export Limit with the remaining 300 MW held in reserve, while Dinorwig pumped hydro station was taken out of reserve and run instead since it was available at lower cost.

So to summarise, the total available supply at 5:30pm – generation plus interconnectors – was 47.405 GW while the peak demand at this time was 46.825 GW. This means that the actual spare margin on the system during the peak was just 580 MW! Even a relatively small power station trip would have caused an actual shortage and triggered blackouts. Had Viking not returned to full service it would not have been possible to meet peak demand.





Of course, Labour – specifically Energy Minister Ed Miliband – was frightened into a realistic assessment of just where their lunacy was taking the country’s energy independence, right?

Perhaps a change of course, more emphasis on reliability vice the windmills of their fevered Green minds?

‘Tis to laugh…or cry, depending on where you live.

The big plan from the British government is to rely on more imported electricity to cover what reliable baseline sources they’re stripping off the island with their policies, counting mainly on the French nuclear program to keep British lights and heat on.

The same interconnectors that had outages not five months ago, and the British government ‘hopes’ to have more cables laid by 2030.

What a plan.

Golly Nell, you can’t make anything this insane up on your own.

Britain will rely on electricity from France to guard against the risk of blackouts this coming winter, officials have said.

The National Energy System Operator (Neso), which oversees Britain’s electricity grid, said it would import power from France and other nearby European neighbours this winter to help backstop the network.

It plans to use the interconnectors linking the UK with France, Holland, Belgium, Norway and Denmark to back up the UK’s own power stations on “tight days” when supplies are stretched.

Interconnectors are high voltage cables laid across the seabed between the UK and its neighbours. Those currently in operation have a total capacity of about 9 gigawatts (GW), with plans to double that by 2030.

The country is increasing its reliance on things that stop turning or ‘switch off at night’ while simultaneously increasing its reliance on imported sources of the very thing they’re removing in their own country at ruinous cost.





What hypocritical stupidity.

…Backup power supplies are essential to support the UK’s power grid as the reliance on renewables such as wind and solar increases. British winters often include lengthy “dunkelflaute” spells marked by low light levels, short days and low winds.

Such weather triggers a slump in renewable power generation and was a key cause of the brush with disaster in January. Some of the interconnectors Neso was relying on had also been shut down as a result of failures or maintenance.

Over the last year about 37pc of the UK’s electricity has come from renewable sources but solar switches off at night and wind is highly variable, meaning alternative sources are important.

The UK is increasingly reliant on overseas generators with annual cost of power imports hitting £3.1bn in 2024 compared with £1bn in 2019, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Most electricity comes from France.

And what happens when everyone is depending on the French nuclear plants and using them as the excuse to shut down their own?

And the lie, the flat-out LIE that wind is cheaper. That renewables are cheaper.

As Steve Loftus points out, natural gas prices ebb and flow with demand. Once a wind or solar contract is signed, it only EVER goes up.





These technologies cannot compete in the marketplace without the government throwing them cash. Taxpayer cash to build, utility ratepayer money to stay afloat.

And Labour keeps pulling the renewables knife across the British throat for their farcical NetZero Kabuki theater.

Miliband is destroying more baseline capacity generation, even as his efforts are failing to force British citizens into appliances run on electricity that is already an unreliable resource at an unholy cost.

They should be fading further and faster if this is the government’s big plan for the coming winter.





If it’s cold in England, it could well be cold in Europe, or hadn’t Labour thought of that?

What if Europe isn’t into sharing?

I thank God for November 5th damn near every day.







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