Britain to loose 40% of electricity generation capacity in 6 years.

shane

website team CRAGger Bedford

this is quoted from the article;

“Ten gigawatts, nearly a fifth, comes from our ageing nuclear power stations, all but one of which are so old that over the next few years they will have reached the end of their useful working life.
On top of that, however, we shall also have to shut down nine more major power stations – six coal-fired, three oil-fired – forced to close”

although it sounds like more posturing for building new nuclear. i feel there’s some scaremongering and major politics at play…..

Some of the numbers in the Daily Mail article are not correct. In 2007, the transmission entry capacity of the UK’s major power producers was 75.2 GW, whereas peak demand was 61.5 GW (from the latest Digest of UK Energy Statistics). By the end of 2015, closures due to the large combustion plant directive and end of life closures of some nuclear plant will lose us 18 GW by my reckoning. This is therefore not a loss of 40% of capacity, but only 24%, and some new generation is already in the pipeline.

There are 7.8 GW of new power stations with planning consent, mostly combined-cycle gas turbines. Wind turbines consented or under construction add up to a further 8.5 GW. Even once a rough allowance is made for the intermittency of wind by dividing installed capacity by three, this gives us about 11 of the 18 GW “generation gap” in 2015. Any new nuclear power stations won’t be generating until well after 2015, and will effectively just replace the newer nuclear stations as they retire. Incidentally, new nuclear won’t decrease our reliance on oil, as it accounts for just 1% of generation.

Any chance, I wonder, of some Government thinking about decreasing the generation gap by decreasing demand for electricity? Over the last few years, we’ve decreased electricity consumption at home by 40%.......