Well, here we are. After months of feverish speculation over whether the UK is prepared to cope with winter, the cold has well and truly set in.
As temperatures have slid down, energy demand levels have been climbing steadily higher to reach their peak this week at around 54GW. But far from flickering lights and looming blackouts, the UK is comfortably getting by with forecast surplus capacity of between 7-8GW at its tightest – a margin of around 14 per cent, which is reassuringly more healthy than the 5-10 per cent supply margin predicted by Ofgem last June.
Since then, of course, a spate of unplanned and unlucky nuclear outages looked set to erode those conservative margins even further. A safety net of 2-5 per cent certainly didn’t feel very safe, and National Grid was quite right to bring in the big guns: in this case, lucrative contracts designed to keep a reserve bench of capacity on standby should the worst come to the worst.
SSE’s Peterhead, ScottishPower’s Rye House and RWE’s Littlebrook plants are the lucky few chosen to collect consumer-funded handouts to keep their plant out of the market and ready to react.
And with wholesale prices at their lowest winter levels in years, the seldom-used plants have probably done quite well for themselves. At £250/MWh for a monthly test run, their operators could hardly complain.
And neither could National Grid. After all, it’s better to be safe than sorry three months before an election.