UK gas storage26 Jun 2018 22:44
http://euanmearns.com/the-beast-from-the-east-coal-gas-and-the-uk .......
Posted June 18, 2018 by Roger Andrews ...........
Key points .............................................
In late Feb 2018 high pressure over the North Atlantic and low pressure over the Mediterranean combined to generate a strong easterly airflow that brought Siberian temps to Western Europe, increasing heating demand to the point where there was a shortage of natural gas. The outcome was an increase in UK coal generation, partly because coal briefly became cheaper than gas as a source of electricity generation but mostly because the UK did not have enough gas in storage to fill both home heating and electricity generation needs. The UK, however, plans to shut down all its coal plants by 2025, and in this post I speculate as to what might have happened if they had all been shut down in 2018. The conclusion is that the UK would not have been able to cover peak load deficits during much of the cold period owing to inadequate gas supplies and installed gas capacity.
It’s fortunate for the UK that the wind blew strongly during the cold periods around March 1 and 17. This, however, is unusual – cold winter nights in Europe are more commonly associated with high pressure systems parked over the continent that result in no significant wind generation anywhere.
Gas generation actually declined during and around the March 1 and 17 cold periods. The reason for this was that the UK had as little as 5 days of gas supply in storage during March 2018, down from the 10-35 days of storage it had before the Rough facility was decommissioned.
The decline in UK gas storage since then is illustrated by Figure 4 below, which reproduces one of the Figures from the Drax quarterly report. .........
https://s22.postimg.cc/ux3ujls8x/Untitled.png ......
If the extra coal output had been met by gas, it would have consumed around an extra 6 TWh of fuel – more than was available in storage by the end of March.
The question now becomes, what would have happened if the UK had no coal plants? According to Drax either the lights, the heat or maybe both would have gone out because there wasn’t enough gas to go round: ...... Drax’s claim that 12-19GW of spare gas capacity was available is, however, questionable. Gas generated up to 21 GW on March 27 at the beginning of the cold snap and according to Drax there was only 27.8 GW of installed gas capacity, so the amount of spare gas capacity available at that time would have been less than 7 GW, not 12-19 GW –
Without coal it would probably have been necessary to pay large industrial consumers to shut down during these deficit periods to keep the lights on.
While UK govt policy fixates on electricity, gas for domestic heating is a far larger source of UK energy demand in the winter. ....................
https://s22.postimg.cc/nmovktzb5/Untitled.png
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