If Miliband doesn't U-turn, Britain could face power cuts in months
Watching the scenes from Spain and Portugal as Iberians stumbled around wondering what to do without any electricity prompted sepia-tinted memories of the black-outs here in the 1970s. In 1972, the miners went on strike in the middle of winter, reducing supplies to the power stations and triggering power cuts. I can remember doing my school homework by candlelight.
It happened again with another NUM strike starting in the autumn of 1973. On the day before the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, Conservative prime minister Edward Heath declared a state of emergency.
The Central Electricity Generating Board decided to switch off power on a rota basis between 7am and midnight every day, with blackouts lasting up to nine hours. Factories (remember those?) and businesses closed with more than a million workers laid off.
The use of electricity for floodlighting, advertising and for the heating of shops, offices and restaurants was banned. Households were without electricity for hours every day. The areas to lose power were listed in the papers each morning and television went off the air at 10.30.
Oil companies were ordered to cut deliveries to private and industrial consumers by 10 per cent, petrol coupons were issued, a 50mph speed limit introduced, a heating limit of 17C imposed on offices and commercial premises and street lighting dimmed.
From Jan 1, 1974 a three-day week took effect and in February Heath called an election with the question 'Who Governs?' only to receive the answer 'Not You Ted'. Labour were returned to office but the shock of that period would continue throughout the governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, with national bankruptcy, rampant inflation and economic mayhem culminating in the Winter of Discontent.
But while it was difficult it was not a catastrophe. It was still possible to heat your home with coal, cook on gas, listen to a battery powered radio, pay for food in the shops with cash and make a phone call.
What was apparent on Monday in Spain and Portugal was the total dependence we now have on electricity-driven devices and how vulnerable modern society is to a collapse in the grid for whatever reason.
Everything stopped.
Rail transport was paralysed for hours, flights diverted and the Madrid metro shut down. On the roads traffic lights failed, causing huge jams. The mobile phone and internet networks collapsed, while shops closed their doors when their electronic tills failed.
We still don't know for certain what happened but the finger of scientific suspicion points to the heavy use of solar power. For those of us who have no clue how these things work, we are learning about the importance of inertia in electricity grids. In conventional power systems – fossil-fuel or nuclear – the large, heavy turbines continue to rotate at a constant speed through inertia even when power generation or demand changes.
With renewables, however, there is no inertia, which makes maintaining a stable grid frequency more difficult. This phenomenon is known to the people who run the system. National Grid boffins are trying to design a new approach to keep the system running at the right frequency with renewables. In some regions like South Australia, where there is a heavy use of solar power, systems operators allow gas generators to run to deliver inertia to the grid and maintain frequency.
This seems to be the most likely explanation for what happened in Iberia on Monday and applies to other renewable inputs like wind upon which we are expected increasingly to rely. Does Ed Miliband know about this potential vulnerability and if so why has he not told us about it?
Britain is particularly at risk both because of its switch to renewables as part of the Government's aim to decarbonise the grid by 2030 and its heavy reliance on imported electricity. We have been close this year. In January during an anti-cyclonic period of no sun or wind which the Germans call Dunkelflaute, a black-out was only averted because of electricity from Norway through the 450-mile interconnector.
But many Norwegians object to paying more for their domestic power to meet overseas demand for their power. They take issue with the poor energy decisions made by their neighbours, like Germany's ban on nuclear power. Now we can add the UK's mad dash to decarbonise the grid. Why do we assume that gas and oil will always be available from elsewhere – and why should we import it when it can be extracted from our own North Sea fields if new licences were allowed?
Mr Miliband has been on a mission recently to denounce all and sundry who dare to question the breakneck speed of his decarbonising agenda, though this is a con since we will still need gas as a back-up for the foreseeable future. The next few years will see our ageing nuclear power plants phased out leaving a gap before new ones are built so wind and solar will have to take up the load.
Yet we now discover that this is fraught with uncertainty. Not only are we being left exposed to any breakdown in international supplies but there are inherent issues with renewable generation that may not be resolved by 2030.
The problems may be with us now. The National Grid is investigating unexplained outages that hit the UK's system hours before Spain and Portugal were plunged into blackouts. There was also an unexplained failure of the Viking Link interconnector between the UK and Denmark.
A few years from now, maybe sooner, the UK will face the same problem as Spain and Portugal, only far worse. Just before the crash on Monday, solar was providing about 53 per cent of Spain's electricity with another 11 per cent from wind. Gas was providing only about 6 per cent. Ed Miliband wants Britain to be doing even more than this.
At least it is usually sunny on the Iberian peninsula so if they can solve the inertia problem they are blessed with copious solar power. Here, in a cold, high pressure winter with little wind and no sun, those power cuts of 1972/3 will no longer be a distant memory but a present-day reality.
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