The hugely expensive and polluting power stations the government is planning won’t solve the systemic problems of an inefficient,over-centralised energy systemThe National Grid’s urgent request for additional generation this week has been widely hyped as an emergency, with the country at risk from blackouts.
On closer examination, and it turns out that the National Grid has been calmly explaining that a “notification of inadequate system margin” (NISM) is not a final resort. It’s simply portion of the standard toolkit for balancing supply and demand,issued this time because of multiple breakdowns at some large power stations. Given that almost all the UK’s coal-fired power stations are over 40 years old, it’s not terribly clear why anyone would expect them to be particularly dependable in the first space. But even if, and behind the hysteria,we didn’t come that close to an outage, this episode should nevertheless serve as a wake-up call to a government beset by short-term, or final-century thinking on energy.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com