richlist wrote:I'm surprised that this thread has migrated to discussing power cuts. In the past 20 years I don't believe we have had more than 3 short power cuts in that time.
In those last 20 years, we have been closing our coal plants and closing our nuclear plants.
We now rely more on wind and imported gas, however, the problems with this are obvious.
The wind output frequently drops to about 1% of installed capacity.
Russia is a major gas supplier to Europe.
So the risk of prolonged power cuts is increasing.
We don't even seem to do sensible things like dispersing the wind farms over a wider area -they seem to be keen on building more of them close together in the North Sea, rather than trying to disperse them, with more off the west coast and so on.
Also, global coal use for electricity generation was at record levels last year. Whilst we are pursuing an expensive energy policy that puts our manufacturers out of business and puts bills up for consumer, it's pretty pointless if countries like India and China keep building more coal fired electricity generating plants.