The National Grid issued a surprise supply warning for Tuesday evening saying that UK capacity was close to being reached, as temperatures dropped and people returned home.
A notice of “tight electricity margin” was sent out warning of a potential shortage from 7pm, saying that the buffer of spare capacity will narrow.
The warning was issued for the evening time when demand tends to increase, as people return home from work and outside temperatures drop, and revealed that the grid is struggling to match demand with supply.
The National Grid soon dropped the warning as contingency plans kicked in, but industry experts warned it was a sign of “much tighter days ahead”.
“The notices are intended to be a signal that the risk of a System Stress Event in the GB electricity network is higher than under normal circumstances,” the National Grid said.
Warnings are issued when “there may be less generation available” than operators expect will be needed “to meet national electricity demand”.
Phil Hewitt, director at Enappsys, said: “This is the first tight day of the winter but it is not super tight. It is a small appetiser of tightness, there will be much tighter days ahead.”
A cold spell has hit the UK this week with colder-than-normal temperatures, forecaster Maxar Technologies LLC said in a report.
Minimum temperatures will be as low as 3ºC in London and 1ºC in Newcastle on Tuesday, which will drive up gas and power demand before temperatures rise again next week.
As winter bites, temperatures will drop further and there is also a drop in the amount of wind power generated.
The nation is going into the coldest months of the year with its tightest supply buffer for seven years, and National Grid Plc has modelled the risk of power cuts in the event of a gas shortage that would restrict supplies to power stations.
That has prompted it to pay hundreds of millions of pounds in utilities to extend operations at highly polluting coal plants that were due to shut permanently this year.
Wind power output was as low as 3,958 megawatts around noon on Tuesday, compared with more than 10,000 megawatts a day earlier.
India cancels school-leaving examinations
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
