Has anyone prepared for possible powercuts this winter?

Lysander said:
People forget that it's possible to have fun and be creative... without electricity.

One of my main sources of entertainment are my acoustic musical instruments. No charging or power source needed... they run on human power!
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Oh god, I thought the horrors of a power cut couldn't get any worse.. Please keep the power on electricity people :eek:
 
panyan said:
Id probably walk over to my bed, get in, launch chrome, and spend the rest of the evening browsing ocuk from my phone :)
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Good luck with that after the first little while ;)

Mobile phone masts do not from memory have much in the way of backup power normally ;)
IIRC unlike land lines they tend to have either no ups, or a very short term supply intended more for blips in supply.
 
King Damager said:
Live in London, own a kinetic lamp.

I'll be just fine

kd
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I can think of few places I'd rather not be than London in the even of a prolonged power cut ^^

But its all just scaremongering anyway. Theres always a chance something bad will happen and papers like to remind us of this with far too much regularity
 
We're in a bit of a weird position with regards to domestic power generation - if the press rumours are correct within the next week or two its expected the first of an avalanche of nuclear power station deals will be signed (EDF, CGNPC, Hitachi & Toshiba) which should total up to an obscene amount of stable power generation once built.

Unfortunately, they won't be complete until the mid 2020s, and in the gap between then and now there is a massive production gap that appears to have absolutely no hope of being filled.

Grab your jumpers and pitchforks kids!
 
I lived through bad power cuts in SA. Some times it would go off for over a day and more than twice a week for years. I could never understand it, they would say they are trying to allocate the load evenly. They didn't have capacity? Seems odd to me. Why not increase capacity? If people are prepared to pay for it. What's the problem? I can understand gas shortages in some ways because its just gas. But electricity can be generated in different ways. We should just start more coal fired power plants, if we start having power cuts, but more modern ones with cleaner burning technologies. Power cuts are terrible in SA i could not imagine how terrible it would be in london.
 
I have 7 3.5kW generators, one will easily keep my house going - and just under 100 gallons of juice for them (in a separate building).
I think I'll be OK - I could power half of our street if I wanted to, and I will do - provided they keep me in beer of course.
 
The facts

National Grid currently has over 85 GW of electricity generation connected to the network, 28% of which is Non-renewable coal generation (Approx 24GW).

A typical winter has a peak forecasted electricity demand of around 55 GW.

Assuming all of the connected generation is available then there is a margin of about 30 GW. But, wind generation and other renewable sources are intermittent, they do not output at full capacity all of the time.

If all of the coal generation were to suddenly stop then as it stands the safety margin is dramatically reduced to within the 5% mentioned in The Telegraph article.
Is this scenario likely to happen? No

Read the National Grid Winter Outlook report for more info.
 
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What you say is true and looks good on paper however many of the remaining coal plants are burning through their hours and bubbles faster than expected and will either be forced to take units off or tell the Eu and their directives to do one

Also too much generation relies on gas which we are incapable of producing on our own so if the Russians want to play ball with the gas prices they could cause real problems
 
Dig up the cable supplying power to your home and attach a diesel generator to it. They did this in my street once when there was a supply fault. They plonked a genny at the end of the street and dug up the leccy pipe from the road and stuck it in it.
 
Now that we've had to shut down our coal fired stations because of global warming,
we can buy spare capacity from China which is happily building a new coal fired power station every week :)


Right hand: Oi Left hand, whatcha doing?
 
bitslice said:
Now that we've had to shut down our coal fired stations because of global warming,
we can buy spare capacity from China which is happily building a new coal fired power station every week :)


Right hand: Oi Left hand, whatcha doing?
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So we are lowering our CO2 to offset China's raise in CO2. Nice.
 
LeeUK said:
So we are lowering our CO2 to offset China's raise in CO2. Nice.
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Sort off, although per person China is still putting out less co2 than we are, and because they're one of the main producers of a lot of stuff we buy at least some of their co2 emissions are basically ours by proxy.

I'm not sure if it is still the case, but at one point China were building dirtier coal power stations than we could in the west (if the political will was there for use to even dare suggesting building them new), because basically various governments and I think IP owners didn't trust China not to just use the tech required without payment, or to use it for other things once they had the processes needed.

gizmoy2k, try 2040...(may be a slight exaggeration)
IIRC it takes about 5-10 years to build a nuke plant once the design is finalised and planning permission is done.
Unfortunately with the "local" protesters that are sure to descend on any place they suggest building them, and get in the way of construction, and objections to the planning process, it could take 5-10+ years just for permission to be granted for the site.

The stupid thing is, this has been known about for years, but successive governments haven't had the balls to address the issue until it's become obvious that we aren't suddenly going to get more sun than the Sahara, and that Wind power oddly enough isn't reliable enough to be used as a primary power source.

/is slightly fed up of the short term thinking of politicians that means they aren't able to look at two closely related sets of figures (IE generating capacity going down, population/power use going up, or people being convicted of crimes going up and prisons closing), and realise that there will be a problem.
 
I especially enjoyed this quote:
If necessary, the UK could import more liquefied natural gas from elsewhere, but this would cost more and could have implications for household bills.
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Good to know the cost of their short-sightedness would be passed on to the rest of us.
 
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