Britain Reaps What It Sows

Who could have possibly seen this coming?

After celebrating the closure of its last coal plant in 2024 with royal fanfare, Britain is finding itself woefully short of power this winter and facing crushing energy costs. Just last week, the British grid came perilously close to rolling blackouts as demand came within inches of eclipsing supply. It was the closest Britain has come to a major blackout in 15 years.

On a good day, Britain can meet nearly half of its power needs with wind generation. On a bad, gray day when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun is a no-show, the countless billions that have been spent on the UK’s renewable generation might as well have been flushed down the loo.

Last Wednesday, January 8, Britain’s 22 gigawatts (GW) of installed wind power provided just 2.5 GW of generation during peak demand at 5:30 pm. Total demand across the UK was almost 19 times higher at nearly 47 GW. To keep the lights on, Britain had to fire up every gas plant that could run and import every GW of power available regardless of eye-watering prices.

Despite the all-hands-on deck effort, the UK was left with a spare margin of just 580 megawatts (MW) of power. If a single power plant had tripped offline at the wrong time, or an undersea cable had been out of commission – as a 700 MW cable was scheduled to be but fortunately wasn’t – grid operators would have been forced to implement power cuts.

Dispatchable Fuel Diversity is Essential

The rest of the winter could be exceedingly painful. Because the weather has been so uncooperative, Britain’s gas usage has been through the roof and gas reserves are beginning to get painfully tight. Centrica, which owns half of Britain’s gas storage, reported that reserve gas stocks are 26% lower than in January 2024, and if needed would last less than a week.

Could there be a more damning case study for the importance of dispatchable fuel diversity? For British consumers, some of them living in the shadows of closed coal plants, this ongoing grid crisis and ever-growing energy bills must be infuriating.

Wholesale electricity prices in the UK are now 151% higher than pre-Covid levels. They are the highest in Europe, fully doubling between 2010 and 2024. On average, they are 175% higher than the average price of electricity in the U.S. And to put an exclamation point on it, for the first time on record (since 1979), the UK has the most expensive electricity prices of any member country within the International Energy Agency.

This is simply a remarkable failure of energy policy and a clear warning of the limitations of renewable power and the dangers of abandoning dispatchable fuel diversity.

To be clear, building more wind and solar power can’t fix the dark doldrum problem. In fact, more renewable generation that pushes essential dispatchable power off the grid will only make it worse. From Britain to Germany to major grids in the U.S., the limitations of leaning so heavily on weather dependent energy are no longer theoretical. Affordable, reliable energy – unlike cooperative weather – is a choice. It’s past time to make the right one.