Power and looming chaos in the UK

An energy crisis is hitting Great Britain. Between dependence on gas and aging nuclear power, the country is flirting with a blackout.

This piece was originally published in French on 17 January 2025.

Last week*, Great Britain came within two thousand megawatts of running out of electricity. Had another 700,000 kettles been turned on at the same time, the lights would have started to go out. That’s still a lot of cups of tea to synchronise, but the buffer between supply and demand is getting too close for comfort. Two energy suppliers going offline simultaneously could well have had a profound impact on life in the UK.

Sensing the potential for trouble earlier in the day, Britain’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) had issued an “Electricity Capacity Market Notice” at lunchtime. That is essentially an instruction to key power stations to generate the electricity that they had promised to supply or be hit with penalties. Including the safety margin – to allow for the untimely failure of just one supplier – the projected demand of 44,695 MW would exceed 99.5 % of the anticipated maximum possible supply (44,910 MW). That is far too close for comfort.

The notice, for last Wednesday evening, was the third of the winter, and it is testament to an essential public service – the electricity in the grid – approaching the point of failure. It never used to be like this. The coal-fired power stations of my childhood were not pretty – and the pollution was dreadful – but they were certainly reliable. Coal dug from British mines could be burned in British power stations just when we needed it.

We now live in a very different world. In recent years, British energy policy has been driven by the rush to “net-zero”. But we need rather more than wishful thinking to underpin our energy security. Coal is now history – the last English coal-fired power station closed last year – while our dwindling fleet of ageing nuclear power stations provides us with less energy than they used to. Meanwhile, investment has been focussed on so-called green energy, principally from solar panels and wind turbines. In recent years, solar farms and wind turbines have become common features in the British countryside.

These renewable resources certainly have a role to play, but they are not reliable. The problem last Wednesday was plain to see by anyone who ventured outdoors. The sun had set, and the air was relatively still. These things happen on cold winter evenings just as they have always done. Solar panels produce nothing at night, while all the wind turbines across the country aggregated only 4,000 MW – around a quarter of what they managed on more windy days earlier in the week. Meanwhile, plunging temperatures exacerbated the usual demand peak in the early evening as domestic usage picks up.

We got through that crisis by burning gas, and lots of it. Gas-fired power stations were running flat out. By 5 pm last Wednesday, over half the electricity in the grid came from gas turbines. It was a sellers’ market. The Times reported one expert’s view, “The generators at the margin realised that they could charge what they liked”.

But even that was not enough. Britain’s own power stations would have left us well short. The crisis was only averted because almost 7,000 MW of imported electricity flowed into the country through the interconnectors from the continent, including 700 MW from Denmark, 1,400 MW from Norway, and around 3,000 MW from France. So much for Brexit! At times like these, we might be paying fancy prices to our European neighbours as well. Certainly, Britain is in a poor position to negotiate. Without French electricity, British industry would have been forced to shut down production last week. Either that or domestic users would have been plunged into darkness. Politics might run on vacant promises and clever slogans, but science cannot be fooled. As I teach children in my physics classes, useful energy output can never exceed the total energy input.

Britain, therefore, has a huge problem. Even our penchant for burning gas is hardly a viable long-term solution. Quite apart from the government’s self-imposed net-zero targets, the United Kingdom is no longer self-sufficient in natural gas – our own reserves from under the North Sea are by now much diminished, and we now import gas like other European nations.

But years of plenty have left us with minimal storage facilities for the gas we buy on global markets. In yet more worrying news, it was reported that Britain had only one week’s worth of gas in reserve. (France, by comparison, had enough for the next 17 weeks.) For a country so dependent on gas to generate electricity as well as to heat many of our homes, this is a shocking state of affairs.

At times like this, paucity of foresight and lack of planning have left the UK vulnerable to the whims of the markets and the unpredictability of nature. It could have been so different. The UK was once a world leader in nuclear power. The world’s first commercial reactor opened in northern England in 1956, and by the turn of the millennium, nuclear energy provided around a quarter of our electricity. It’s now more like 15%, and most of that capacity is due to be retired by the end of this decade. Two new nuclear plants are under construction, but the first is running late, and work on the second has barely started. Meanwhile, the crisis is now, and the need for solutions is urgent.

Small modular reactors could be delivered to existing nuclear sites much more quickly and plugged into infrastructure that is already in place. That, however, takes political will. It’s simply not acceptable for anyone in authority to assume that because the lights stayed on last week, they will keep glowing throughout this winter and during those that follow. As the switch away from fossil fuels gathers pace, we need more than hot air to keep the country supplied with power at the flick of a switch.

Nuclear power has its problems, but so do power cuts. A government that cannot feed its people cannot expect to resist public discontent – and inevitable civil unrest – for long. The same is possibly true for the supply of power. Environmentally sustainable policies are to be applauded – we need to leave the Earth in a fit state for our grandchildren after all – but if the lights go out on cold winter evenings, then the outcome for the UK might well not be green but black.

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By Debbie Hayton

Debbie Hayton is a teacher and journalist.

Her book, Transsexual Apostate – My Journey Back to Reality is published by Forum

* This article was first published in French by Le Point on 17 January 2025: Froid, gaz et chaos : au Royaume-Uni, l’électricité vacille.