Q3 2019 report

by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London

The biggest event of the last quarter was undoubtedly the blackout of August 9th which left over a million people without power and caused travel chaos. 

We deep dive into the event and find that while there are several lessons to learn, Britain has one of the world’s most reliable power systems and so further improvement will be difficult to achieve (see our special report on the blackout).

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by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London

On the 9th of August, Britain experienced its worst blackout for a decade.

Over 1 million people went without power, a sharp reminder that life is very difficult if the grid doesn’t manage to “keep the lights on”. That common phrase fails to capture the deep disruption caused in workplaces, hospitals and transport links. Ordinary lights going off was not the issue.

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by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London 

The third round of offshore wind auctions were announced in September, bringing forward 5.4 GW of new capacity for a record low of £44/MWh.¹ 

This price has fallen 30% since the last auction in 2017, and could possibly mark these as the world’s first negative-subsidy wind farms, which pay money back to UK consumers over their lifetime.²

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by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London 

“Energy storage is like bacon: It makes everything better”.¹ 

It is considered one of the most important issues within the energy industry, with “the potential to dictate the pace and the scale of the energy transition”. We look at the reasons why, and the technologies to watch in the future.

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by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London 

A big open question is how flexible will Britain’s power system need to be as it transitions to more renewable energy, and how much of this flexibility should come from energy storage? 

Getting to over 80% wind and solar power, as is suggested for reaching net-zero, might require a ten-fold expansion from 3 GW of storage today to over 30 GW in the coming decades.

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by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London 

Cottam coal-fired power station closed down after 50 years, taking with it one-fifth of Britain’s remaining coal capacity.

This leaves just five operating coal plants, two of which are set to close by March 2020. Coal power stations again supplied less than 1% of Britain’s electricity, averaging just 0.2 GW over the quarter. Coal output has halved over the last 12 months, and fell below 1 GW for the first time since the 1920s.

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by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London 

Britain’s power system had another record-breaking quarter, with renewable energy hitting new highs, while fossil fuels, demand and carbon emissions all hit new lows. 

24 of the records we track were broken over the last three months.

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