The Liberal Democrats have called on the Government to convene the emergency Cobra committee to address the possibility for blackouts this winter. Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said: “Too much time has already been wasted by the Conservative Government in failing to protect Britain from blackout misery and even higher prices this winter.
“Liz Truss must convene Cobra immediately and spell out her plan for our country. We need stronger leadership from this new Prime Minister. The political squabbles in her divided Conservative Party must stop getting in the way of governing Britain.
“A failure to act now could see millions plunged into rolling blackouts whilst petrol and heating oil prices spiral even further out of control. We need real action from this Government, including a clear plan to boost energy supplies and secure the necessary energy resources.”
The first planned blackouts in decades might hit parts of the country this winter if power plants cannot get enough gas to keep running, the body that oversees Britain’s electricity grid has warned. Households are being encouraged to help avoid blackouts, “save money and back Britain” by using more energy during off-peak times.
In what it called an “unlikely” scenario, the National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) said that households and businesses might face planned three-hour outages to ensure that the grid does not collapse.
Adam Bell, former head of energy strategy at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said the possibility of blackouts is high in the coming months if there is a cold winter and the situation in Ukraine does not change.
He said: “The chances of a very cold January itself are quite low, it’s only 10% or one in every 10 years. But in that scenario, given the constraints Europe is under, given the constraints our system is under, even with the interventions the National Grid already have planned, which includes reopening some coal plants and paying people to turn down their demand, you would likely see some rolling blackouts for domestic customers.”
Mr Bell said such a situation would be caused by “a very cold January, we’re unable to import power from the continent, we can’t get more gas because everywhere in Europe is demanding it as well and this means that we have to shut down some of our gas power stations”.
He also said the UK cannot prepare for this situation now because of little capacity to store gas, adding: “We can store some gas but not enough to cover a week or a fortnight.”
Mr Bell added that between 30% and 40% of our power comes from fossil fuels, saying: “We haven’t built enough renewable power yet to ween ourselves off (fossil fuels) fully. We’d need to replace gas with other sources, such as hydrogen, to really remove gas from our system. So we’re still vulnerable to this sort of disruption. Not the least because 80% of us rely on (gas) for our domestic heat.”
