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My @thetimes column: Four/five incidents in 2 weeks on the UK electricity grid. We’re begging France for power. Why are the grid bosses gaslighting us?
times-comment.com/72547570
Juliet Samuel retweeted
It’s been covered a lot but an utterly mad situation. While bridges genuinely deteriorated. And everyone applauded the looting of a charity pot for special interest causes.
My @thetimes column: An incredible tale of how an ancient royal charter charity founded to look after London’s bridges was hijacked by left-wing causes
We may not have feral youth on the street, but make no mistake: this is looting
With @lfg_uk
times-comment.com/3b6d00ae
It’s official: a legal investigation has found engineers in Britain’s electricity grid control room are stressed because renewables make it so hard to keep the lights on. And when they raise concerns, managers won’t listen - they only want “good news”
thetimes.com/article/413d547…
See also
My @thetimes column: Four/five incidents in 2 weeks on the UK electricity grid. We’re begging France for power. Why are the grid bosses gaslighting us?
times-comment.com/72547570
And now this: Grid operator accused of “cover-up”
times-comment.com/8f5a59e8
My @thetimes column: An incredible tale of how an ancient royal charter charity founded to look after London’s bridges was hijacked by left-wing causes
We may not have feral youth on the street, but make no mistake: this is looting
With @lfg_uk
times-comment.com/3b6d00ae
Juliet Samuel retweeted
According to @thetimes, @neso_energy CEO Fintan Slye who earned just under £1 million last year admitted he knew about the control room concerns but failed to act on them saying Neso may have incorrectly prioritised other things at a time when there was a “huge amount of change happening in the organisation”
How does the Times know this?
Because somebody inside NESO recorded the meeting and gave it to the press
Clearly NESO staff have lost confidence in their execs and have no issues embarrassing them in public
Although it's fair to ask why Fintan didn't make his mea culpa public himself. Perhaps he simply didn't want to admit either to getting it wrong or to allowing the focus on CP2030 and keeping the government happy to get in the way of keeping the grid secure
There's a clear public interest in knowing this so I hope Fintan and NESO don't respond to this by trying to hunt the people who made and released this recording
The more productive approach would be to repair trust with staff, listen to and act on their concerns over grid security, and ensure cultural change so future concerns can be raised and acted on internally without staff feeling they have no options other than to leave or go to MPs and the media
@Miatsf @mgshanks @AndrewBowie_MP @ClaireCoutinho @harrietc @ColinMoynihanUK @drlukeevans @ashley7fox @TiceRichard @cmackinlay @DavidGHFrost @mattwridley @Iromg @AllisonPearson @MerrynSW @EdConwaySky @afneil @mattotele @jonathan_leake @julietsamuel @energygovuk @ofgem
thetimes.com/uk/environment/…
Juliet Samuel retweeted
To illustrate Claire's point about grid security, frequency has veered outside normal operating limits on each of 17, 18, 19 and 20 October. Balancing costs so far today almost £18m, compared to an average of about £2.3m. Link to Enact in reply.
It is extraordinary that NESO’s takeaway is that the core allegations made by the whistleblowers are unsubstantiated.
As I’ve always said, the core allegation is that the electricity grid is not being run securely. In that respect, the Eversheds report is utterly damning.
Not only does it say that renewables are making our grid more difficult to manage, but it says that several engineers in the control room profoundly disagree with NESO management’s claim that the grid was secure on 23rd June.
There are multiple serious problems highlighted - from a culture of managers only wanting to hear ‘good news’, to poor record keeping, and, most concerningly, a reluctance to action complaints from engineers because of the need to 'keep stakeholders happy'.
In other words, managers are failing to improve the security of our electricity grid because keeping Ministers in DESNZ happy is seen as more important.
NESO's Chief Executive earns close to £1 million a year and the whole organisation costs the better half of a billion pounds to run. The country and billpayers deserve better.
Government should be holding NESO to account, but instead, Ministers spent their time attacking me for raising the control room engineers' concerns and for making sure that any kind of investigation took place at all.
If this had been washed under the carpet, then where would we be?
A grid that is increasingly at risk and Ministers who, frankly, preferred to be asleep at the wheel rather than to do their jobs and protect our electricity supply.
With regards to the engineers' concerns on corporate affairs and record keeping, Eversheds did not give a clean bill of health as NESO is claiming. They found that a culture of 'reputational sensitivity' does indeed affect operational decision-making, and recommended several changes to correct significant failures in record keeping practices.
While I am on maternity leave, the Conservative team will continue to press the Government on this issue, because the bottom line is this: if we cannot trust NESO management to be honest about our ability to keep the lights on, how can they stay in their roles?
I look forward to the release of Ofgem's investigation on whether the grid was run securely on 23rd June. But we do now know that the control room strongly feel that it wasn’t.
Juliet Samuel retweeted
You can't run a system with millions of variable consumption and generation and storage devices the way you ran it when you had 150 fossil fuel generators and a handful of nukes.
It's not the new technology (wind, solar, batteries, EVs) that's the issue - it's the total failure to change the way we manage the system.
This is why locational wholesale market (which is automatically dramatically more flexible) was so powerful - and is increasingly used in the OECD. We need decentralised signals so the system self-optimises.
Octopus already processes 300,000 data points a second to do this for the many GW we control - but the brute force of the main system management just doesn't have this granularity.
It is increasingly urgent to reform our electricity system. These control room issues, the £50m spent balancing the system in a single day, the £3bn a year on curtailment, the prospect of £7-9bn a year of curtailment by 2029/2030.
It's all avoidable but not with the tools of yesterday
It’s official: a legal investigation has found engineers in Britain’s electricity grid control room are stressed because renewables make it so hard to keep the lights on. And when they raise concerns, managers won’t listen - they only want “good news”
thetimes.com/article/413d547…
Meanwhile, the energy secretary is… er, criticising her colleague’s Immigration Bill
Energy Secretary attacks Mahmood’s migrant crackdown telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
Juliet Samuel retweeted
Entirely obvious from the outside. The political constraints put on NESO aren't compatible with engineering reality.
It’s official: a legal investigation has found engineers in Britain’s electricity grid control room are stressed because renewables make it so hard to keep the lights on. And when they raise concerns, managers won’t listen - they only want “good news”
thetimes.com/article/413d547…
Juliet Samuel retweeted
"Some withnesses expressed the view that the press release should not have stated that the system was 'not at risk' when the system was consistently in breach of operational limits, with operators working around the clock."
Juliet Samuel retweeted
When you read an official investigation, bear in mind they are authorized on the basis of "... never open an inquiry, audit, or review without knowing what evidence it will surface..." Considering that, this about the UK electricity system over the summer is quite something:
Juliet Samuel retweeted
Fresh horror every single day
Juliet Samuel retweeted
This from @CitySamuel was the column I wanted to write this week, until she went and wrote it. Fascinating and alarming thetimes.com/comment/columni…
Juliet Samuel retweeted
1/ @Stanford's @Usama_Polani has an outstanding paper on fiscal impact of migration in Western Europe, which @jburnmurdoch covered in the FT last month. One chart from his appendix deserves far more attention in Britain. A 🧵.
“A renewables heavy grid can’t operate within safe limits so we should widen the limits”
