Not many people know that
By Paul Homewood
https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-by-fuel-type
Electricity demand reached an even higher peak last night at almost 48 GW and with light winds blowing today, power supply will be tight again tonight.
We'll no doubt muddle through again, but no one in the media seems to point out the elephant in the room; the fact that the demand for electricity will increase rapidly with the switch to heat pumps and electric vehicles.
The Future Energy Scenarios published by National Grid last year assume peak demand will rise to 65 GW in 2030 and 81 GW in 2035:
https://www.neso.energy/publications/future-energy-scenarios-fes
Even with both the 9 GW of interconnection capacity and our entire CCGT fleet running at full speed, we would be lucky if we currently had 50 GW. (On Tuesday I/Cs were running at about 6 GW due to outages).
However, there are no plans to build new gas capacity, Hinkley C's production will do little to offset the shutdown of older nuclear plants and the planned additional wind capacity could provide at most a few GW on a calm day like today.
This will not simply be an occasional peak hour. The FES already assumes that there will be strong demand smoothing, electric vehicles charging at night, etc., so that the daily range will be significantly lower than now.
In the last 24 hours, demand averaged 39 GW. On a pro rata basis, this 81 GW is likely to be at least 67 GW in 2035.
According to the FES calculations, residential heat pumps, for example, will consume 40 TWh per year in 2035, and around 8 TWh per month in winter. That works out to 11 GW of power, probably much more in really cold weather. And that assumes they run consistently over 24 hours a day, an optimistic assumption.
Electric vehicles will also significantly increase electricity demand during off-peak times.
Therefore, daily demand in cold weather is likely to exceed 70 GW. While pumped storage and batteries can help for an hour or two in the early evening, they need to be recharged afterward, so they don't contribute anything over 24-hour periods.
Instead, we will continue to need at least 70 GW of dispatchable generation capacity.
At the moment we barely have 40 GW.
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