Wholesale electricity price normally fluctuates up and down quite a lot, but usually in the £0-£200-ish range. Yesterday afternoon it spiked up to £1400 briefly, then came back to normal. Unlucky to those paying dynamic pricing!
I can’t find any news or reporting about this. Any idea what happened?
I did notice that gas usage was really high, at about 26GW at one point, and wind was very low. So maybe it was simply high demand combined with low supply, now that we don’t have coal power? 😕
I don’t live in the UK, but I do know that if a nuclear reactor scrams(basically, enters a condition in which it needs to rapidly shut down to ensure plant safety, while rare it is entirely safe 99.9% of the time), it will often do this to power prices as other plants take time to start up and make up for the sudden loss in a large generator. It could have been that?
nope, I didn’t see any change in our nuclear output. And all the reactors are online, except one which is in planned maintenance: https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses
Our nuclear capability has diminished a lot over the few years. We entered 2020 with 8 sites, and now only have 5 sites. 3GW of generating capacity gone. They developed too many problems after 35-45 years running.
Only one of them has a replacement being built. Hinckley point which is due to come online in 2030 (Originally 2023) and will replace those 3GW. Unfortunately, by then we’ll have shutdown the current 5 sites. That means we’ll exit the decade -5GW of nuclear generation with no other plans for nuclear.
Whilst I’m very pro-wind and storage, I do worry that the current aging nuclear reactors and the ever expanding budget / schedule of HP is going to lead us to having an energy deficit on a more regular basis in the second half of the decade. However the die was cast 10/20 years ago. All we can do now is get storage & connectors in place as soon as we can.