Britain could run into electricity shortages next winter

Impetus

The British edition of Ars Technica –, which gets force fed to Irish residents*, has an article on Britain’s shortage of power generation capacity.

This has got worse of late due to the shutting down of several coal and other power plants. Britain has only two tin can + string interconnectors with mainland Europe at present. The power traffic is one way – ie GB bound.

For a country with 60 million inhabitants that represents a pathetic expenditure on network resources. Switzerland has about 10 GW of international grid connections for a population of about 8 million. Based on this, GB should have 70 GW and Ireland should have 6GW. Ireland has 0.5 GW, and the other party has a deficit in production terms. This makes GB useless for Ireland for cold winter day scenarios.

Ireland is also running into a period of decommissioning of conventional power stations to comply with EU diktat. The same EU that is blocking infrastructural investment by government.

It seems to me that Ireland needs to plan in terms of new generation capacity, new international grid connections, and new energy conservation initiatives, or the country will face some cold days in December in the coming years. Very little new money has been invested in new generation capacity of late. In the same way as very few houses were built over the last decade or so. On the subject of new houses, Irish insulation standards for the majority of the housing stock are poor. Cheap windows and doors, limited floor, wall and roof insulation. The same applies to office buildings.

Money spent on good insulation, and good quality doors and windows will pay dividends on energy savings for the life of the building. The same applies to heating and cooling. Air heat pumps using R32 refrigerant are about 7x efficient – ie for 1kw of power they can throw out 7 kw of heat (or cooling). This is far more efficient than conventional central heating, and delivers cleaner air with low humidity. I can heat a well insulated room in Ireland (double kitchen dining rooms connected) to 25C 40% relative humidity with a consumption of about 200W to 300W per hour, using an R32 based inverter.

Perhaps we need a new metric – the number of watts of electric generation capacity required per Euro of GDP. For good measure, we might also publish another metric to show the debt intensity of the GDP. A country that closes its eyes to the debt intensity of the GDP is a breeding ground for financial bubbles. Like the ones that burst at the end of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ era. The same one that has allowed the undemocratic EU to run Ireland by diktat since the financial crash.

http://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2016/06/uk-could-face-power-shortages-this-winter/

*on mainland Europe, when one visits arstechnica.com, one remains in the US site – without being forwarded based on one’s IP basis to their GB site. Anglo-Saxon micro-terrorism.