In article et,
"Dave Liquorice" writes:
On Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:14:40 +0100, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

I'd guess this applies to the whole country - if everyone presently
heating with oil changed to electricity.

The lights would start to go out. What was the figure for the number of
homes heated by oil bandied about not long ago 1.5 million? Say 15kw/home,
that would be another 22.5GW required on the nationa supply I don't think
the available winter margin is quite that large...

Nothing like. Normal UK load is around 40GW, and peak load around 60GW.
We've had peaks in the last five years where we were we had only around
1% spare capacity with all generation plant that was working online
(very close to rolling blackouts).

Plus the fact that very few houses will have a supply large enough to
directly replace an oil fired system anyway.

and the supply network isn't sized for that sort of load from many
houses at once.

--
Andrew Gabriel
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