{"id":1257,"date":"2014-10-15T07:58:51","date_gmt":"2014-10-15T07:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/?p=1257"},"modified":"2014-10-15T07:58:51","modified_gmt":"2014-10-15T07:58:51","slug":"national-grid-pressure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/news\/national-grid-pressure\/","title":{"rendered":"National Grid under pressure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Britain\u2019s National Grid has announced that emergency measures are going to be introduced to prevent the \u201clights going out\u201d this winter.<\/p>\n

Making a Mess of Power Supply<\/h3>\n

Energy investment banker Allen Brooks says this is \u201can unintended consequence of the UK\u2019s green energy plan that has forced the closure of fossil fuel and nuclear plants,\u201d pushing the nation\u2019s surplus power availability \u201cto a razor-thin margin that might disappear this winter\u201d as a result of power-plant outages.\u201d It may also be caused by \u201clack of renewable energy at times when the wind doesn\u2019t blow and the sun doesn\u2019t shine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emergency measures include compensation for offices and factories that agree to shut down for up to four hours a day to provide capacity for households, and asking owners of old fossil-fuel generating plants that we shut down to reopen before the start of winter.<\/p>\n

Those such as former US vice-president Al Gore who argue that renewables increasingly make \u201cgood economic sense\u201d because they\u2019re heading towards commercial viability — the cost of solar panels has halved over three years \u2013 ignore \u201cthe costs associated with the intermittency of the power output,\u201d Brooks says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWind farms do not generate power when the wind isn\u2019t blowing, and solar power isn\u2019t produced during the night. Electricity demand also varies\u2026 in ways that the output from wind and solar may not match.\u201d<\/p>\n

A recent cost-benefit analysis by Charles Frank of the Brookings Institute that takes into account all the costs of building and running power plants, including the costs of dealing with intermittency through providing standby power, shows that wind and solar are much more expensive using the standard measure of \u201clevelized\u201d cost.<\/p>\n

\u201cSolar power is the most expensive way to reduce carbon emissions. Wind turns out to be the next most expensive, with hydro-power providing a modest net benefit. The most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power.\u201d<\/p>\n

copyright: Martin Spring of OnTarget<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Britain\u2019s National Grid has announced that emergency measures are going to be introduced to prevent the \u201clights going out\u201d this winter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1258,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[231,228,59,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-eco","category-featured","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1259,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions\/1259"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalbuzz.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}