CIBSE Annual Lecture 2012: How secure is Great Britain’s electricity and gas supply over the next decade?
http://vimeo.com/53144064
"The 2012 CIBSE Annual Lecture, held on 7 November, gave Alistair Buchanan, Ofgem's Chief Executive, a chance to review the UK's rapidly changing energy supply landscape. Maintaining energy security of final supply was emerging as a key issue. It could offer new opportunities for the energy demand side to play a key future role.
In his lecture "How secure is Great Britain's electricity and gas supply over the next decade?" Alistair Buchanan looked at the complexity of energy supply and planning for the future, He touched on existing resources and the potential of shale gas, which has helped the US move towards self sufficiency, from a European-wide and UK perspective."

Grabbed from a poster on AECB facebook page. http://www.facebook.com/groups/theaecb/
"I would urge all to take a hour of your life and watch this lecture. If the CEO of OFGEM is saying we are running out of energy we should take note! Towards the end he says the UK in the winter 2010/11 was two days away from running out of gas. I can validate this as over that same period Northern Gas Networks had us on formal notification of supply interruption for weeks. The future is not Orange, but bleak!"

The IEE has been bang on about this problem for year.
As a stop gap I can't see a problem with fracking, if we need the energy it is going to happen.

That is indeed an interesting lecture. Pointing out that the crunch we all knew was coming is coming sooner than anticipated because various programmes have been slow/late. So new nuclear hasn't moved far yet, CCS has not happened, gas supply has not increased and doesn't look likely to, the Germans turning nuclear off puts more demand on gas supply, wind is going in, but slighly behind schedule, some biomass projects cancelled, and the coal plants are using their 15,000 hour allowances up fast. The financial crisis has delayed investment in all sorts of things, causing some of the above. All of which gets us to a state of almost no slack around 2017.

One thing that is relatively easy to do quickly is demand management (insulate everyone's houses), which should help. It's a pity that the main scheme for that (Green deal) seems unlikely to make any real difference.

isn't this just another part of the none too subtle background campaign to soften the UK public up to the idea of fighting Europe for an extension to the life of the coal plants in 2016?

I've looked at the numbers not so long ago and it's a load of rubbish to say we're heading for trouble IMO (or at least that it's anything that can't be simply resolved) - at the moment we've actually got some older gas plants being mothballed because coal is so cheap and we've just had 3GW more new gas plants come on stream in the last few months.

I'm expecting a fair proportion of the coal plants to switch to a big enough proportion of cofired biomass (or even just full biomass), coupled with only using 1/4 or half their turbines to comply with the regulations anyway, or possibly even bung in the SO2 scrubbers, or a mix of the 3 things... I know that's being discussed seriously by one of them anyway.

The last scare story on this was such obvious scaremongering about the percentage of peak capacity we'd have in 2016 relative to now - we've got more additional capacity now than at any time in the last few decades precisely because we've got new generation coming on steam while the old generation is still there as well. the figures they gave for 2017 just bring us back to the situation we were in in around 2004, and I don't remember too many brown outs back then.

Having watched some of this with all the pretty pictures reversed on screen - probably my software, I found the notes and slides if you want to read his presentation rather than watch the video.

http://www.cibse.org/content/documents/Events/CIBSEANNUALLECTURENOV12.pdf

Posted By: CWattersI think what concerns me most is that oil prices are high at a time when world economy is in poor shape. What's going to happen when the world economy recovers?

The wholesale price is a bit lower at the moment, what all the fuss is about on the radio today.
I am sure if we bothered we coudl find a live price feed, there is one for electricity on the NG site.

One thing about expanding a market place is that you get economies of scale and alternatives become more viable. So at $120+ a barrel, shale gas is viable. Environmentally this is probably a good thing. At over $150 the conventional renewables become viable, and the world can stand that price (about $0.10/kWh wholesale).
So rather than look at high prices as a bad thing, think of them as an opportunity. If you really believe that high energy prices are going to be a problem, start investing in them

Posted By: atomicbisfwhich won't be cheap either economically or environmentally

what aBOUT in terms of EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested)?

Posted By: wookeyGavin, the ofgem fellow covered all that, saying that mothballing couple be quite expensive to undo, especially if astations get canibalised for parts. Biomass conversions had been cancelled (lack of finance/changes in guaranteed rates). Maybe he's wrong but he really did seem like he knew what he was talking about. He wasn't very enthusiastic about "the idea of fighting Europe for an extension to the life of the coal plants" either, saying people liked to suggest this but he thought it would be awfully hard to do in practice.

Did you watch the video?

Much as I respect your general expertise in this area, I'm currently inclined to believe the OFGEM man.

I made the time to watch it last night.

It is interesting stuff, and some of it I wasn't entirely aware of such as the impact of the loss of the Turkmenistan gas pipeline on the European gas situation.

BUT, I do think his analysis is suspect on a number of points

1 - He refers to the lower line on the graph showing the derated capacity margin as relating to the net balance between imports and exports per year. This is plain wrong, it doesn't, it relates solely to the maximum generation capacity available at one time relative to the peak level of demand. It's ridiculous to think that at these times we must also take account of the potential that all our import/export capacity will be exporting at full capacity.

AFAIK the UK is under no obligation to export electricity if the UK grid is short on capacity, and if it is, then that's a very simple thing to change (as he acknowledges other countries aren't under any obligation to export to us). Therefore the lowest line that does hit zero is a nonsense line. Fair enough don't assume we can import anything, but don't make out that there's any chance we'd be exporting to Europe unless the capacity exists to do so without endangering the UK grid.

This is a key scaremongering element I've seen referred to a few time this year, and either those making this point don't know what they're talking about, or they're deliberately scaremongering with it.

2 - As far as I could tell, he never once mentioned the 2GW CCGT plant that opened this autumn at Pembroke, or 100MW hydro at Glendoe et. This seems a little remiss given the detail he goes into over the plants that are due to close.

3 - He seems to have some sort of expectation that gas will come into the UK via the LNG terminals, then automatically flow through to Europe to meet their demands, and that we're somehow at risk because the rest of Europe is at risk. We don't actually need to export the gas again if we need it ourselves, although I suppose naked economics might result in this happening if the price sky rocketed in Europe - we'd certainly be in a much better position than Europe in this respect.

4 - The inevitable rising electricity prices as we switch increasingly to higher price gas, renewables, and higher cost clean coal dramatically change the economic picture he refers to, and will almost inevitably lead to a surge in investment in new gas plants, as well as conversion of some of the closing coal plants to biomass.

5 - I don't think he makes any serious mention of demand destruction, which should follow both from government energy efficiency policies (well maybe not so much if green deal is a damp squib), and as a result of rapidly rising prices, plus falling energy efficiency costs.


One thing I think we can all agree on though is that electricity prices are going to be rising dramatically over the next few years, starting early 2013. These price rises are likely to make people reminisce fondly about the last few years single digit price rises.

Still, it's good that he's raising this all up the agenda as he is, as we do need minds to get focussed on the problem as the UK has been pissing around for too long.

According to the EU Energy Portal, in 2009, we were 26.6% dependant on imports. France was 51.3%, Portugal 80.90% and Germany 61.60%.
In The EU, apart from Denmark (and there is a huge population difference), we rely less on others than anyone else.

I am sure if push came to shove that we could cut back by a third.

http://www.energy.eu/

As far as I know it is all energy. Though not checked into it in detail.
There are many reasons why we import and export 'our' energy. One being that we deal on the 'spot market' more than most counties, this has allowed us to have lower prices, though sometimes they are higher for a short time.
Personally I am not worried about scrutiny as such as we have several 10's years of easily available reserves if needs be, just because we are not exploiting it does not mean that it is not there.

Closer look at the list and I see that Estonia and Romania are lower than us.

Posted By: fostertom

Posted By: atomicbisfwhich won't be cheap either economically or environmentally

what aBOUT in terms of EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested)?

Bitumen sands to synthetic fuels is 3 and coal to synthetic diesel 0.6 from the figures I looked up. Both but especially the latter are very capital intensive. At the moment most of South Africa's diesel is produced by SASOL from coal at Secunda. There was a plan to build another 80 000 barrel per day plant on the Waterberg coal field called Project Mafutha bit it was shelved because a carbon capture solution wasn't ready.