On the other hand, how many rely on gas-powered electrically circulated central heating, as compared to a gas or coal fire?
In our village may be 1 in 5 still have an open fireplace or a woodburner, and we are rural with good access to supplies of wood. If you look at the average town or city I would expect 95% or more to rely on electricity for heating due to the fact that gas boilers still need electricity to function.
If there were widespread power cuts during a cold snap a large proportion of the population would have no heating, and in a lot of cases (new builds/flats etc) no facility to even open a fireplace up. So far we have dodged a bullet, there have been several close calls but no widespread blackouts, how long can that continue, who knows, but sooner or later the worst will happen.
People blame privatisation for the national grid having much less resilience, but really its down to the people who set the rules, i.e. the government, if you set the rules up correctly then the suppliers will provide resilience because its financially rewarding. This includes things like spare capacity, as well as things like ‘black start’ capability and distribution redundancy.
It has been made worse by the need to move away from coal, don’t get me wrong, it’s the right thing to do, but it hasn’t been accompanied by a reappraisal of the whole electrical supply requirements of the UK. Renewables are good, and can provide a lot of our requirements, but the supply is fickle, its dependent on weather conditions, and a cold quiet foggy spell in winter is the worst possible combination of weather. In those conditions we need a reliable fall back, coal is the obvious solution short term, no its not ‘green’ but if you are only using it lets say 15-20 days out of 365 then I don’t see that as a problem. Coal can be easily stored at the point of use, and supplies can be brought in at any time, and if the global situation deteriorated we do have supplies in the UK. Ideally we would need to design power plants that could be started up easily with say 24 hours notice, weather forecasting is now pretty accurate at this timeframe, so supply and demand can be estimated fairly accurately. Nuclear is probably the right solution for the ‘base load’ say 30-40% of UK capacity.
To me carbon capture seems like too much trouble, we should be looking at energy storage, (lots of options here, flow batteries, pumped water, etc.) longer term to allow us to store power for use during the cold winter spells. We should also explore tidal as this is predictable.
The problem is this all costs money, but if we don’t pay the price now we will pay a higher price later. National energy supply security should take a much higher place on the government agenda, as if you get it wrong it can have an economic impact for the whole country as we are discovering now as the Russian aggression towards Ukraine has disrupted the global market. If we had accepted some very modest price rises over the last 20 years we would not be looking at the dire economic situation we now find ourselves in. A secure supply is essential for economic growth, because as we have found out sudden price rises rock the economy because indirectly everything relies on it. I suspect that energy prices (Electricity, fuel, gas etc) are indirectly responsible for a large proportion of the current inflation
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