Britain goes one month without coal-fired electricity generation in ‘milestone’ achievement
Britain has gone one month without coal-fired electricity generation for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.
National Grid ESO, the utility company’s independent electricity system operator, announced the “milestone” achievement this morning (10 May), days after one energy provider appealed to customers to use electricity during the Bank Holiday Sunday afternoon, in order to prevent renewable power being shut off.
“Another milestone for Britain!” National Grid ESO declared online. “It’s now a coal free month of electricity generation in this country as of 12am on Sunday morning.”
The operator added that it had been 30 days, seven hours and 36 minutes – more than 727 hours in total – and counting since the nation had used coal.
The nationwide lockdown to stop the spread of Covid-19 caused demand to fall 15 per cent during April. However, this rapid drop has left many power plants battling to manage surplus electricity supply.
Demand across the UK was expected to fall to record low levels over the weekend, leading energy supplier Octopus to offer to pay customers to use more electricity to help the grid cope.
“This weekend, low demand for energy combined with lots of renewable energy means renewable sources might have to shut down,” Octopus said in a message to customers last week “We’re running a special invitation-only trial to see if home customers can help”.
In February, the Government announced it planned to bring forward the deadline for the phase-out of coal from Britain’s energy system by one year to 1 October 2024.
iNews
Brussels turns up the heat on Brexit talks
Brussels will push Britain to engage in detailed talks on access to UK fishing waters and other top EU priorities this week, warning that the two sides’ negotiations on a future relationship will stall unless work on all key topics advances in parallel.
Ahead of a third negotiating round starting on Monday, EU officials said Brussels was wary of British efforts to make rapid headway on securing a trade agreement, retaining access to the bloc’s aviation market and advancing other core UK concerns, including energy, while leaving fish and other issues in the slow lane.
“We need to see that there is a willingness on the UK side to make progress — we were very disappointed with their attitude in the last round ,” said one EU official. “We need to see progress in parallel on all areas, otherwise the talks will slow down.”
On energy, the UK is seeking agreements with the EU on electricity and gas trading, as well as on nuclear energy co-operation. The EU negotiating mandate also foresees that a future relationship deal will cover these issues.
Both sides have emphasised the need to make as much progress as possible in the future relationship talks ahead of an EU-UK summit in June but positions remain far apart, with a matter of months left to conclude a deal.
Brussels diplomats said the EU had now accepted that the UK was unlikely to seek an extension to its post-Brexit transition period due to end on December 31, despite the risk of Britain crashing out of the bloc’s customs union and single market without a trade agreement.
EU diplomats believe that any trade deal would probably need to be struck by October to be ratified in time.
“It’s clear wants to show progress by June on the , aviation and energy and then say there is no need for an extension, and that a deal can be done on these points,” said the EU official.
Britain insists it is fully committed to the talks and that the EU’s frustrations are based on the UK’s determination to fight for its own vision of the future relationship: one that safeguards the country’s independent, sovereign status and prioritises regulatory autonomy.
“We do not recognise the suggestion that we have not engaged with the EU in any area,” said a UK spokesperson. “We will continue to negotiate constructively to find a balanced solution which reflects the political realities on both sides.”
FT Weekend
European lawmakers to consider tougher climate law
European Union lawmakers are considering toughening the bloc’s planned climate law, with stricter near-term emission goals and a binding commitment for every member state to decarbonize by 2050, according to a draft document seen by Reuters.
Such goals are required if the world is to stick within limits scientists say are needed to avoid devastating fallout from global warming, the lead author of the document, Swedish lawmaker Jytte Guteland, said.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive, proposed the law in March – weeks before the coronavirus pandemic prompted an economic crisis that the bloc has pledged to tackle with “green” investment.
Centred around a legally binding goal to cut EU net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, the law must be agreed with lawmakers and member states to take effect.
Under a draft proposal for the parliament’s position on the law, each individual EU country would need to reduce its national emissions to net zero by 2050 and achieve net “removals” of greenhouse gases after that date.
This is tougher than the Commission’s bloc-wide 2050 target, which had raised the possibility that some of its 27 members could decarbonise later, if others did so early.
The draft also calls for the EU’s 2030 climate target to be tightened to a 65% cut in emissions from 1990 levels, rather than the 50% or 55% cut being considered by the Commission.
Reuters
Lower electricity use in lockdown leads to problems for National Grid
For the millions of Britons working from home during the coronavirus pandemic, it may feel as though their energy use has soared as extra hours working on laptops, video calling and watching television add to their electricity bills.
But overall electricity demand in Britain has plunged by up to a fifth since the UK government followed other countries by imposing a lockdown at the end of March. The sharp decline reflects the closure of many businesses and industrial sites forced to shut because of the pandemic.
The fall poses a real challenge to a small group of engineers in Wokingham, near Reading in the south of England, who sit in front of large screens monitoring complex charts and data to keep electricity flowing around Britain by balancing supply and demand, second by second.
The team at the National Grid Electricity System Operator, the company charged with managing Britain’s grid, have been working harder than ever during the pandemic to keep the system stable and avoid blackouts.
“It is basically unprecedented in the history of the current market structure, which is 20 years old,” says Tom Edwards, senior modeller at Cornwall Insight, an energy consultancy.
National Grid said it expected electricity demand over the early May bank holiday weekend to match the record low of 15 gigawatts hit for a short period during the Easter weekend, which was well beneath the 18GW to 19GW minimum levels recorded at the same time last year.
Such periods of low demand can create “significant operational risk”, National Grid admitted in papers to the energy market regulator Ofgem last month, although publicly the company presents a more confident face.
“We have a variety of tools and processes — and a lot of experience — to draw on to operate the grid in low-demand conditions and do not anticipate any issue continuing to reliably supply electricity,” National Grid said, although one senior director admitted it was “hard work for the guys in the control room” to manage record troughs.
Just as interruptions can cause outages, such as the widespread blackout last year, low demand leading to excess supply can destabilise the electricity system and, in an extreme situation, lead to power cuts.
This oversupply of generation can cause the frequency of the electricity system, the measure of stability, to rise. National Grid must keep the frequency within a band of 49.5 hertz to 50.5 hertz to ensure the grid is stable, although it has to surge or plunge some way outside those levels before customers or power plants are cut off. Just before the worst blackout in more than a decade in August last year, the frequency fell to 48.8 hertz.
The engineers at Wokingham try to control high-frequency problems using various techniques, such as paying wind farms to switch off or by exporting power to Europe via subsea cables known as “interconnectors”.
National Grid has also agreed a deal with French utility EDF to reduce output from its Sizewell B nuclear plant in Suffolk to help manage lower demand. It has also held discussions with smaller generators during the lockdown about switching off if required.
But National Grid has also warned it may for the first time have to issue a national plea to power stations to cut supply if problems of low demand persist. An insufficient response to that entreaty would result in an emergency order to switch off.
To make the Wokingham engineers’ job harder, Britain’s lockdown has coincided with record-breaking weather patterns ideal for renewable energy generation such as solar and wind, which have flooded the system with cheap electricity just as demand is low.
Renewables’ share of overall electricity generation reached a peak of 60.5 per cent at one stage last month, according to National Grid data.
When renewable generation surges above 50 per cent, National Grid ESO has to intervene by paying wind farms to switch off or exporting more power abroad to ensure gas plants and other technologies needed to keep the system stable can continue to generate.
But the lockdown is also helping engineers at National Grid to prepare for a situation they will face more often in the future as there is even greater emphasis on renewables to reach the government’s 2050 target to reduce emissions to “net zero”.
Mr Edwards warned that the current crisis could feed through into higher energy bills because it has pushed up the costs of managing the system.
“I’m not concerned about blackouts,” he said. “It could be very expensive to manage, though, because turning off all those wind farms, they are going to want compensation.”
FT Weekend
Gravity-powered batteries generate electricity when the wind dies down
A company aiming to use old mine shafts as batteries to store renewable energy is to build a demonstration project showcasing its technology in Scotland.
Gravitricity believes that it can use large weights on cables attached to winches on the surface to help to compensate for the intermittent nature of wind farms.
The company estimates that the cost of its technology would be lower than the large-scale lithium ion battery deployment being considered by many renewable energy producers.
The Gravitricity method means that on days when more electricity is being generated than is needed by the grid the weight would be lifted to the top of the mine shaft. Then when demand is outstripping supply the weight can be lowered, with the movement of the winches producing power.
The Edinburgh company secured more than £600,000 of funding from Innovate UK, a public agency, two years ago and has raised £750,000 through a crowdfunding drive.
Today it has announced plans to build a £1 million demonstration of its system in Leith.
It has signed a land rental agreement with Forth Ports and work is scheduled to begin in October, which could mean that the equipment is operating by the end of the year.
Miles Franklin, the chief engineer, said that a two-month test programme would take place and give the company vital data as it prepares to move on to larger projects.
He said: “In our first test we’ll drop the weights together to generate full power and verify our speed of response. We calculate we can go from zero to full power in less than a second, which can be extremely valuable in the frequency response and back-up power markets. We will then run tests with the two single weights, dropping one after the other to verify smooth energy output over a longer period.”
The company believes that its technology could eventually be used with weights of up 12,000 tonnes being released into deep mine shafts.
The Times
Utility Week’s weekend press round-up is a curation of articles in the national newspapers relating to the energy and water sector. The views expressed are not those of Utility Week or Faversham House.