Natural gas and imported electricity bailed out the U.K.'s renewables experiment for the third time this winter.
New Civil Engineer (1/9/25) reports: "The National Energy System Operator (Neso) on Wednesday issued its third capacity market notice (CMN) of autumn and winter 2024/25 to ensure that no blackouts occurring on the UK electricity grid.Neso also anticipated the low margin in advance, releasing an electricity margin notice (EMN) to the market the night before at 8.39pm on 7 January. It anticipated the drop below 500MW margin the next day, but as it was not yet within four hour window, an EMN was issued prior to the CMN...Neso then alerted the public to the issuance of the CMN at 12.01pm on Wednesday 8 January, to come into effect at 04.00pm. The reasons for the alert were listed as 'margin below threshold set out in Capacity Market Rules.' Anticipated demand was 44,695MW whereas supply was 44,910MW. The anticipated margin between demand and supply was too small (below 500MW), rather than negative, but this was enough for the automated system to jump into action and issue the CMN...Neso has a system called the capacity market, which can automatically produce alerts called capacity market notices. The system is sometimes referred to colloquially as the 'blackout prevention system'...The researchers said low wind capacity was in-part to blame, in combination with the cold snap...'Gas plants were called upon heavily – almost all of the 28GW of available capacity was needed but at least four plants seem to have taken economic advantage of the market situation and dropped their supply in the wholesale market only to be called back on in the balancing mechanism at very inflated rates. Interconnectors were almost already at near full import on the day ahead market, but two were out of service (NEMO to Netherlands and Viking link to Denmark – 50%).'"
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