Catastrophic National Electric Grid Outage Beckons for Britain

Written by Ed Hoskins on August 16, 2019. Posted in Current News

The United Kingdom is edging closer to a “full Fukushima” type shut down of the nation’s electricity grid system.

Summary

Understand  that a nil operating margin for electricity generation in a developed economy is an existential National Emergency.

Understand that a coming Ice Age, to whatever degree, is the climate catastrophe that really is worthy of concern for future generations.

The reversion to a Little Ice Age is predicted for the near future, (within decades), and a Real Ice Age could well return this century, next century or this millennium.

In spite of the vast establishment that has been created to support Green policies and the resulting huge and probably unnecessary expenditures and the increased existential National economic risks, realise that:

Man-made Global Warming / Climate Change is most likely a non-problem.

And even if it were a problem, it could not be effectively addressed by damaging the economies of the Developed World in attempting to control their emissions of CO2.

Understand that there is no Catastrophic risk from Anthropogenic Global Warming.

The major error is the conflation of Man-made atmospheric CO2 with other truly toxic pollutants.

Atmospheric CO2 is after all plant food, the very stuff of life.

Pursuing the Energy Policies outlined here without fear could well:

• possibly avoid the risk of catastrophic failure of the UK electricity grid.
• derail the vast expenditures for a Green Climate Change agenda that are already locked into the system.   This expenditure, (estimated to be more than £300 billion, £300,000,000,000 by 2030), has no popular mandate in the UK
• make the UK economy very significantly richer.
• bring significant benefit to all UK Energy users.

Electricity generation operating margin

The UK has fallen well below a safe electricity generation operating margin on several occasions with the output failures of Weather Dependent Renewable Energy technologies.

Load shedding, (power cuts), have mostly been avoided so far, but only by extraordinary grid management measures[1]. But as the elimination of base load power generation continues, so failure will inevitably occur sooner or later.

Nations with embedded Green policy commitments to Weather Dependent Renewables, particularly the UK and Germany, already face existential National Emergencies in that their electricity generating margins for winter loads may often be virtually non-existent:

Global Warming / Climate Change Alarm are embedded in Western Energy policies.

The immediate existential danger posed by Green thinking will not be appreciated until a real and catastrophic electrical grid failure occurs.

So it is a race to the bottom, whose grid will fail first, the UK or Germany?

Then the failures will be a truly self-inflicted National Emergencies.

As the generating resources then needed to recover from grid failure will have been lost, it will not necessarily be possible to rectify the situation quickly.

Reliable generating resources have been eliminated by the Green policies, originating from the European Union and particularly re-enforced in the UK by the 2008 Climate Change Act.

These irrational decisions will have been taken ostensibly “to save the planet”, but the actions of those participating Nations will have been taken unilaterally, as compared to the rest of the world, at their own costs and to their own commercial and National economic disadvantage.

The scale of the real catastrophe that will arise with failure of the electricity generating system in UK or anywhere in Europe is not yet fully understood.

However:

The chaos and vast damage that will arise from a UK power outage for just a day or so will be hugely destructive to lives, livelihoods and investor / business confidence.

If an outage continues for more than a day absolute anarchy will result, much like the UK riots of 2011, but much much worse.  The UK has already lost its ability for true self-sufficiency in consistent electricity generation.

Overall ~6% of UK power is already imported, usually at times of peak need from France: this is a major existential National risk in itself.

Overseas power sources should be urgently replaced by reliable in-country power generation simply on grounds of National Security.

If the French are experiencing shortages themselves at winter peak times they will certainly not be exporting their power to support the UK.

This risky situation has been worsened in the recent past firstly by the current outage for maintenance of about 30% of the French nuclear capability and secondly by storm damage to the French-UK interconnector.  More recent French announcements indicate that they intend to reduce their commitment to Nuclear power from ~80% to ~50% and therefore they will reduce their ability to sell the nuclear power overseas.

PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX. 

Please DONATE TODAY To Help Our Non-Profit Mission To Defend The Scientific Method.

Trackback from your site.