In the news this morning, National Grid are stating that they are confident that they will be able to keep the lights on this winter in the UK. I am afraid that I don’t buy into their optimism, just recently, during the heatwave, we were in danger of running out of power so we were forced to purchase an amount of electricity from Belgium, via one of the cross channel cable links, the Belgians made us pay through the nose for the small amount that we used, the price paid per megawatt was an all time record high.

There doesn’t appear to be any policy for development of future power provision here in the UK, as usual everything appears to be a shambles. There is this vision put forward that renewables will save the day, if only that could be true. Europe is slowly being strangled by its gas supplies from Russia being gradually diminished, Europe relies heavily on gas to generate electricity, so with their supplies of gas being strangled I doubt that there will be any surplus electricity for the UK to use via the undersea cables this winter. Our power generation capabilities run at maximum quite often throughout the winter, our power generation frequently runs on a knife edge and we come close to serious power outages. If we cannot rely on surplus generation in Europe this winter we will be in serious trouble with power generation, I understand that the few remaining coal powered generators have been given more time before they are phased out, a contradiction of the recent energy statement made to the rest of world concerning our plans to combat climate change. I think the retention of the coal powered stations is certainly common sense in the times that we now find ourselves.

Looking forwards, which is something the energy industry should be doing, there is the headlong rush to bring in electric vehicles which will need a large increase in the ability to generate and distribute energy via an infrastructure that will by necessity need to be upgraded. Perhaps the need for more energy provision has become self limiting by price, the forecast is that an average household will be paying in the region of £500 for energy, that’s gas and electric, for the month of January which is of course one of the most expensive months energy wise. I fear that many families will struggle with those sort of increases, many of us are on pensions and such huge increases in costs we will struggle with.

I made the decision, about five years ago, to use some of our savings to invest in solar power, we had panels installed on our south facing roof that have the capacity to generate 4kwh. I subsequently made a decision to have batteries installed so that we could store the solar generated power that we didn’t use, we now have batteries that can store 12 kWh. On a sunny day such as those we enjoyed recently,we have generated on a good day, 26kwh which means that with the batteries we have enough stored energy to go through the night and we still have about a quarter of the batteries capacity left to start the next day. This means that for most of the days during June and July we have been self sufficient for electricity, during the month of June we drew only 19 kWh during the day time tariff and again coincidentally 19 kWh during the night time off peak tariff. Calculating the cost at the current day plus night rates we used £10.00 of electricity for the whole month, in fact our monthly standing charge was considerably more than the cost of our electricity used. Unfortunately this only works when the sun shines so winter means we will draw considerably more energy from the grid, I have the ability to charge the batteries using off peak electric, we are on an Economy 7 tariff, so throughout the dark days of winter I store 12 kWh of electricity which has cost exactly half that of the cost of daytime electricity, so every time the cost of electricity rises then the cost of installing my panels and batteries becomes even more cost effective.

At this point in time if there is a power cut then we cannot draw energy from our batteries so we are without power. The solar system has to be engineered such that in the event of a power cut the system is isolated so that power cannot be fed into the grid, a safety measure to prevent electrocution of any unsuspecting tradesman working on the grid, however it is possible with right equipment to isolate the house from the grid when there is a power outage and use the power stored in the batteries. There is a cost involved in this modification and I need to consider whether it is worth the cost for the amount of power cuts that we are likely to suffer. It looks as though we are all very likely to suffer power cuts this winter because when it gets cold it is doubtful whether National Grid will have the resources to hand to keep the lights on. Dave W

Nigel B ,

We have a woodburner that gives about 5 kw of heat located in our lounge and being more or less central in the house tends to warm the rooms above as well. My wife and I were only talking this morning about how we will manage if we have to reduce our gas and electricity consumption this winter, we came to the conclusion that if necessary we can shut down the gas central heating and rely on heat produced from the woodburner in the lounge, on reflection it is no different than what our parents did when we were younger, most houses heated only the one room, the living room, and the rest of the house had no heating, there were very few houses with central heating in the 50’s and 60’s and the coal fired back boiler was lit at least once a week for our weekly bath night, brings back memories of ice on the inside of the bedroom windows, we all survived, we wrapped up to keep warm, it looks as though we are going to have to alter out lifestyles if we are to remain comfortable. Dave W