UK winter energy supply 2016-17

Following on from my previous post on gas supply, here's an update on the overall energy situation in the UK this winter.

The good news is that the gas storage site at Rough is due to come back online by 9 Dec, according to Centrica. Of course, it's still only 1/3 full, so we're not out of the woods yet.

The bad news is that several nuclear power stations in France have been offline for safety checks for some time now, and the result is that instead of importing up to 2GW of electricity from France, the UK is importing less, or even exporting to France. You can see this live on the graphs at Gridwatch. This extra power is largely coming from our CCGT (gas) power stations, which of course means increased gas use - this was already showing up in the graph I posted a few weeks ago, and has continued since then. (The red line is 2016 - click for a larger version)

 

It's also proving to be a colder than average winter so far in the UK, so we'll have to wait and see how things turn out over the coming months...