On Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:30:44 +0000, Corporal Jones wrote:

Just How much can the UK generate in GW and how near are we to its
limit,

I thought we only had about 60GW maximum capacity but that doesn't tally
with what TNP said about having "20GW of gas in reserve" CCGT looks to
have reached about 18GW this evening. Oil or OCGT didn't put in an
appearance that I noticed.

Just downloaded the complete data set but my spreadsheet gets a very bad
headache trying to handle it all. I think the peak demand last winter was
in the first two weeks of Feb 2012. In that period the peak was at 1740
on the 8th:

demand coal nuclear ccgt ocgt french irish dutch pumped hydro wind
59165 24159 8051 22094 132 -2042 -212 -828 1799 854 1566

Note:

We were exporting 3.082 GW to the continent, is that included in the
demand figure or is it in addtion? Giving a total capacity at this time
of 62.247GW?

Oil is missing. In the data set the Oil column (P) doesn't even have a
zero in it. It could be an artifact of my spreadsheets head ache but I
don't think so.

If you add up all the positive values you get 58.655GW 0.510GW less than
demand.

... also what happens if we go over our maximum generation limit?

The lights go out, somewhere. As others have said big industrial
consumers are dropped off first but ultimately they "load shed", that is
whole sections of the country are cut off for a period.

If we struggle this winter in will be very interesting to see what
happens next or the one after as several large coal fired stations will
have been forced to close by the Large Combustion Directive by then.

I suspect that even if they do have to drop large commercial consumers
off the grid it won't be mentioned very much in the media. Goes against
the governments "green" credentials and is a bit embrassing when they
have to explain why the lights are going out. They'll waffle of course
and blame "the other lot" for previous decisions, the fact they have all
sat on their hands for decades and failed to make the required long term
strategic decisions isn't relevant to short term politicians.

Provided a large power station doesn't unexpectedly drop off line the
grid can probably survive by dropping off the large commercial consumers
rather than the scheduled rolling blackouts like the early 70's. They
only need to trim the top off the peak in demand not reduce overall
demand.

--
Cheers
Dave.