Thread: The energy crisis
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Old 06-10-2021, 15:43   #158
1andrew1
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Re: Energy companies collapse
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaymoss View Post
it is the freaking Russians Gazprom throttling Europe wanting its own way over a pipeline that is not meeting certain standards

US did the right thing when it come to fuel. I do not know what we can do. Can we quickly build our own storage and pipe it in from the North sea. Do we still have Gas rigs in the North Sea? offloading storage to France is one of the worse things that our countries leaders ever did
What storage did we offload to France?

Texas failed to invest in storage and suffered blackouts as a result, so US is not necessarily a good example to follow.

As FT commentator Brooke Masters notes, the market has not delivered storage capacity and this is strongly needed by the UK due to its reliance on renewables. Market failure. I don't know if this was flagged by the regulator but this is a key reason why we're in a worse situation than a lot of our peers.
Quote:
But Britain has proved uniquely vulnerable in part because of its poorly thought out approach to decarbonisation. A net importer of energy since 2004, the UK has plunged into green energy. Last year it drew a record 43 per cent of its electricity from renewables. However, that share dropped to 37 per cent this spring, as lower than normal wind speeds and fewer sunny days hit production even while demand grew.

Variability is an occupational hazard of relying on solar and wind power, as critics of rapid decarbonisation regularly point out. Yet the UK repeatedly failed to invest in the infrastructure needed to provide proper back-up.

Energy group Centrica announced the closure of the UK’s largest gas storage site in 2017 over safety concerns, and nothing replaced it. Electricity interconnectors linking the UK to European grids are being built — one to Norway became fully operational this week — but they take decades, and a link to Iceland has been delayed by Brexit.

Japan locks in liquefied natural gas supplies with long-term contracts. But UK suppliers, lulled by years of low prices, rely mostly on spot markets. This year’s spike left them scrambling and wiped out the weakest ones.

The fundamental lesson is that headline-grabbing wind and solar projects are not enough. Back-up power and infrastructure improvements are critical, and the private sector is not lining up to provide them.
https://www.ft.com/content/b583559e-...1-32f5734ca1c6
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