Andrew Orlowski envisages what will happen when the wind doesn’t blow Countdown to an energy apocalypse

One day an engineer will turn a key
and nothing will happen. The weather has
been freezing cold. For a few days, the sky
has been bright, beautiful and clear, and the
nights bitterly cold. A high pressure system,
an anticyclone, has settled over Europe —
what the Germans call a dunkelflaute, or literally, “dark
doldrums”. Apart from a desultory turbine or two turning in the
North Sea, the wind isn’t blowing anywhere in Europe.
Having dispensed with much of its reliable, dispatchable
energy generation, the power grid bosses believe that Britain
should scrape by. We routinely make up our shortfall by buying
power from Europe, usually France or Norway, over cables
called interconnectors. But now they have no surplus to sell us.
What follows is a total, nationwide electricity blackout. It’s
never happened before in the UK: which means getting it going
again — what’s known as a “black start” — has never been tried
before, either.
Now large parts of the country are without electricity.
Payment systems and traffic lights go dead. Heat pumps and
the costly thermal bar heaters that accompany them don’t
work, leaving homes freezing. Even if they’re taking cash, shops
can’t stay open without lighting or heating. Trucks can only go
as far as the diesel in their tanks can take them, and filling
stations can’t refuel without mains power.
Food, medicines and emergency fuel all stop moving.
Communications networks are down too, as the mobile phone
sites have at best a few hours of battery backup. Hospitals can
maintain only a skeleton service on their limited supply of
emergency diesel. Then that runs out too, and now things begin
to get really serious. The UK has almost 17,000 water pumping
stations, but most do not have backup power. The first cholera
case is reported within seven to nine days. The first such
outbreak kills thousands over the next few weeks.
In the formulation misattributed to Vladimir Lenin, society
is only “three warm meals from anarchy”. But today’s fragile and
deeply interconnected society is closer to an energy apocalypse
than ever. The blackout the UK is about to experience in this
scenario is not the result of malice — a cyberattack on our grid.
Instead it’s the culmination of a series of decisions on infrastructure
and energy taken over recent decades, and the
complex world those decisions have created.
“We really don’t know how our systems are working,” says
Herbert Saurugg, of the Society for Crisis Preparedness (GfKV),
a German-speaking think tank, and co-author of the book
Blackbox Brownout. “These are not simple machines any more.
There are engineers who know this, but they are not heard.”
So how did we get here?

In the early years of the twenty-first century,
Western Europe made a historic decision to turn away from
energy abundance and low prices. Not only do we generate
much less energy, but what power we have is both less reliable
— meaning it isn’t there when we need it — and it flows through
a system that is now both more volatile and more fragile.
The European Union’s energy strategy of 2007 was the work
of a secondary school headteacher from a small market town in
Latvia, a former Communist Party member called Andris
Piebalgs. Piebalgs had become the EU’s Energy Commissioner,
and in the name of climate change, he envisaged that Europe
would use 13 per cent less energy by 2020. It could make up any
shortfalls with Russian gas, a policy which he defended stoutly.
The Economist anointed him Eurocrat of the Year. Then Russia
invaded Ukraine, and her gas no longer flows to Europe.
The commissioners and also Britain’s own bureaucrats
made the mistake of assuming that falling demand would
continue, and be painless. They had also been seduced by
promises of “smart grids” to balance the books. NESO, as the
National Grid is now called, confirms that it will even pay
people not to use electricity all the year round. But however you
slice a pie that’s too small to begin with, you risk someone
going hungry. As the energy analyst David Turver explains, we
now have a “greater reliance on the kindness of strangers”.
Britain can’t blame the EU for its mistakes, as it has made so
many unforced errors of its own. It shut down its reliable coal
power stations. In 2012, the energy and climate change secretary,
Ed Davey, wanted 20 more new gas-powered stations by
2020, but not one has been built. The UK focused excessively on
far more wind power instead.
Yet during a long, windless spell, it doesn’t matter how
many more wind turbines we build, as without wind none of
them will be generating power. Having ruled out the 20 gas
stations we needed a decade ago, that means storing
wind-generated power to cover the windless periods. Doing so
is incredibly expensive. The Royal Society ducked
the calculations when it examined the issue in its
2023 report on large-scale electricity storage, but
independent analysis suggests it’s anything
between one and 15 times the size of Britain’s
GDP. The consumer pays for this, of course.
Over-reliance on wind increases our risk
because we’ve removed stability from our power
system to make way for it. The grid thrums to a
steady heartbeat, 50 hertz, and even the slightest
deviation from this will cause a crash, damaging
the vital equipment and taking it offline. Traditional gas and
coal-powered turbines, with their spinning mass of metal,
provided inertia: a shock absorber that kicks in to compensate
for a sudden loss. We’ve removed most of that instantaneous
reserve. The dash for wind has created an instability that is now
the norm.

The government’s decision to prioritise wind power
has also had the consequence of strangling the alternatives.
Britain’s abundant reserves of shale gas are to be left in the
ground, and its nuclear programme has been neglected. That
leaves Britain squeezed, reliant on piping in electricity from
abroad over interconnectors.
So what happens when the kindness of strangers falters?
“Interconnectors are presented as a virtue, but in fact they
are symptomatic of weakness,” thinks Turver. Last month NESO
said that the UK should just about scrape by this winter — its
first without coal power station generation since William Ewart
Gladstone was prime minister — thanks to getting around 5 per
cent of its energy needs over these interconnectors. But on the
day of that announcement, one of Norway’s connectors
suddenly failed, taking 1.4GW offline in an instant. The UK
escaped blackouts by a whisker.
The daunting challenge of black starts are what worry
Saurugg, who gave up his career as an officer working in the
security section of the Austrian Army to focus on the risk of
catastrophic energy failure.
“People can imagine a power cut, but cannot think to the
end,” he says. “They have hardly any clue what then happens to
the supply chains when there is no electricity.” Today, every
system is tied to another: when the power fails,
we can’t manually crank a handle any more to
get things working. For example, even a wellstocked
petrol station can’t pump fuel, “because
the station’s computer has to log in to a central
server somewhere, and it can’t do that with no
grid connection”.
Around two-thirds of the population has
nothing left in the larder after a week, says
Saurugg. “Society is on the brink of collapse
within a few days. Help from outside the affected
area can hardly be expected, as everyone is affected themselves
and there will hardly be any free resources available.”

Europe has come close to a full blackout twice.
What are called “frequency incidents” have increased by more
than 50 per cent in a year. With an interconnected market,
failures cascade across borders. For example, a fire on a transmission
line in Montenegro over the summer not only knocked
out the entire country, but much of Croatia and Albania too.
Britain’s energy planners haven’t been idle. They’ve been
given a hard statutory target for achieving a successful black
start target — although they don’t use the phrase any more,
preferring “Electricity System Restoration”. By the end of next
year they should be able to restore 60 per cent of the grid within
24 hours, and get the whole lot working again in five days. It has
been a colossal endeavour.
However, we don’t know if it will work until a catastrophe
strikes. An audit of NESO’s modelling by Professors Keith Bell
and Wolfram Wellssow last year warned that it was far from
perfect: “The modelling details are probably not close enough
to real world behaviour when it comes to rare events and
combinations of circumstances that would lead to very long
restoration times,” they warned. Meeting the statutory target “is
likely to result in need [sic] for very large additional investments
… with decisions made on possibly inaccurate calculation
results”. I asked to see the models, but they are not public.
The operational plan is secret, too “for security reasons”.
NESO would only take questions in writing. But rest assured
that it’s also developed an eco-friendly black start plan: “a
world-first initiative that’s making it possible for renewables to
deliver a new kind of black start capability”.
What worries Saurugg the most is the prospect of social
upheaval. He frets that the accountants have worked to
expunge firms of what they consider “dead capital”, or what we
think of as vital backup. Power plants and backup units “have
been optimised primarily to achieve maximum yields” and
cannot “serve the system per se”, he observes. “What leads to a
more efficient use of resources in everyday life can quickly lead
to large-scale power cuts in the event of a disruption.”
If the accountants have been cutting corners, this is a
terrible way to find out.
Andrew Orlowski is a columnist at the Daily Telegraph

De volstrekte incompetentie van de ‘Veiligheidsdriehoek’.

Er is slechts één islamiet / Arabier met een Nederlandse paspoort / verblijfsvergunning gearresteerd in de Amsterdamse pogrom naar Israëliërs.

https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/israelier-in-de-gracht-en-taxichauffeurs-op-telegram-dit-weten-we-over-de-nacht-vol-geweld-in-amsterdam~a41de62b/

Het is nu de derde keer dat Halsema het demonstratierecht in Amsterdam liet prevaleren boven de openbare orde en veiligheid en het voorspelbaar uit de hand liep.

Wordt het niet tijd dat Halsema aftreedt vanwege herhaaldelijk gebleken ongeschiktheid voor het ambt van Burgemeester in Amsterdam…..waarbij ze eerder de hand boven het hoofd werd gehouden door haar politieke partijgenoten / -ideologen.

https://www.dagelijksestandaard.nl/binnenland/halsema-weigert-op-te-stappen-na-gitzwarte-nacht-in-amsterdam-geen-reden-voor-aftreden

Na gaten in de duinen is er ook een plan om de Oosterscheldedam af te breken.
Alles om de ‘natuur’ te beschermen.

Vijf teams bogen zich over de vraag hoe we Zeeland klaar kunnen maken voor de ‘zeespiegelstijging’ en ‘klimaatverandering’. Eén van de manieren waarop dit mogelijk zou zijn: het weghalen van de Oosterscheldekering.

Kustecoloog Jim van Belzen van het Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut voor Zeeonderzoek (NIOZ) schreef mee aan dit plan, waarin staat dat de Oosterscheldekering zou moeten worden afgebroken.

De Oosterscheldekering is aangelegd voor de bescherming van Zeeland, maar volgens Van Belzen wordt het gebied juist veiliger als ‘de natuur zijn gang kan gaan’, schreef de NOS afgelopen jaar.

https://www.ninefornews.nl/negatieve-reacties-op-superdom-plan-om-oosterscheldekering-af-te-breken-wij-willen-nooit-meer-een-watersnoodramp/