National Grid report on August power cut

[JohnD]

With even the Tory government signalling support for Labour's renationalisation policy, NG has quickly published its report. It suggests the rules should be tilted a bit towards security of supply and away from cost-cutting.

https://www.ft.com/content/afa10890-d3b1-11e9-a0bd-ab8ec6435630

"The FTSE 100 company, which is responsible for keeping Britain’s lights on, has recommended in a final report published on Tuesday into the causes of last month’s outages that there should be an inquiry to “determine whether it would be appropriate to provide for higher levels of resilience in the electricity system”.

Standards approved by the energy regulator Ofgem dictate that National Grid only needs to hold in reserve sufficient automatic back-up power to provide for the unexpected loss of the biggest power generator on any particular day.

But on the day of last month’s power cut, August 9, the amount held in reserve — 1 gigawatt — proved insufficient to protect the system against the unexpected loss of power at both an offshore wind farm and a gas-fired power station."

 

[plugwash]

is the actual report available, or just news articles summarising it?

 

[plugwash]

Found it, https://www.nationalgrideso.com/inf...gy-system-and-electricity-system-operator-eso

 

[motorbiking]

If we renationalise the whole sector, it would be massive. However the grid could be something to move to agency status.

 

[SimonH2]

What came out for me from reading the report was that a) they didn't have enough STOR (Short Term Operating Reserve) available when it happened, and b) they could have done with more inertia (ie rotating machines) on the system to give them a few more seconds to fire up STOR and shut down interruptible loads.
A is likely to get worse as certain papers have their "look at all those dirty diesels - it's evil" type headlines and the population swallow it without thinking. B isn't going to get better as we keep shifting to more and more low/zero inertia generation.