By Paul Homewood
https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-by-fuel-type
Electricity demand peaked even higher yesterday evening at nearly 48 GW, and with low winds today, power supply will be tight again tonight.
We will no doubt muddle through again, but nobody in the media seems to be pointing to the elephant in the room; the fact that demand for electricity will start to rise rapidly as we transition to heat pumps and EVs.
The Future Energy Scenarios, published by the National Grid last year, projected that peak demand would rise to 65 GW in 2030, and 81 GW come 2035:
https://www.neso.energy/publications/future-energy-scenarios-fes
Even with both the 9 GW of interconnector capacity and our full CCGT fleet working flat out, we would be lucky to get 50 GW currently. (On Tuesday I/C s ran at about 6 GW because of outages).
Yet there are no plans to build new gas capacity, the output from Hinkley C will barely offset the shut down of older nuclear plant and extra wind capacity planned could only supply a couple of GW at most on a windless day like today.
And this will not simply be a matter of an odd hour of peak demand. The FES already assumes that a lot of demand smoothing will take place, EVs charging at night and so on, so the daily range will be much less than now.
In the last 24 hours, demand has averaged 39 GW. On a pro-rata basis, that 81 GW in 2035 is likely to be at least 67 GW.
According to the FES calculations, for instance, in 2035 residential heat pumps will draw 40 TWh a year, about 8 TWh a month in winter. That works out at 11 GW , and probably a lot more in really cold weather. And that assumes they are run evenly over 24 hours a day, an optimistic assumption.
EVs will also add significantly to electricity demand during off peak.
It is therefore likely that daily demand will exceed 70 GW in cold weather. While pumped storage and batteries might help out for an hour or two in early evening, they will need recharging afterwards, so will contribute nothing over 24 hour periods.
Instead we will still need at least 70 GW of dispatchable generating capacity.
At the moment we barely have 40 GW.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
January 10, 2025 at 08:57AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
The government is insanely committed to massive expansion of wind power capacity and possibly solar as well which is even more insane in that part of the world.
The fundamental problem is that no amount of capacity yields a significant amount of power during a severe wind drought (Dunkelflaute.)
The meteorologists should have warned the public and the Government that wind droughts made the transition impossible before the Government decided to bet the farm on wind power. They/you lost.
If you know the ABC of intermittent energy then the result of the net zero program was inevitable but it has taken the collapse of Britain and Germany to make the point that should have been obvious long ago.
Therefore, the green transition is impossible with current storage technology.
I am looking to forward to serious investigation of the Met Bureau to find out why there was no warning of wind droughts and a similarly searching investigation of the irresponsible authorities who failed to do due diligence on the wind supply.
That would appear to be a fundamental requirermen tbecause a constant supply of affordable energy is the life has been the lifeblood of modern societies since the horse and buggy era.
Sadly the public have been left in the dark about the cause of the power problem and conservative commentators have not yet done any better than the mainstream media to explain the ABC of intermittent energy Consequently it is virtually impossible to have an informed public public conversation about the cause of the crisis.
Further reading https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/the-energy-crisis-how-we-got-here-and-how-to-move-on
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