In article ,
"J.J." writes:
(Andrew Gabriel) wrote:

Yes, we've had an exceptionally stable/reliable supply in the
UK for perhaps 30 years now (or well over 40 years if you
ignore the 1972 miners strike). There are a number of reasons
why that's unlikely to be maintained in the future though.

What sort of reasons do you have in mind for causing a less
stable/reliable UK mains power supply?

In a nutshell...
o We are no longer self-sufficient in energy (became a natural gas
importer last year) and are increasingly going to have to rely on
sources from the less stable parts of the planet and sources
which require traversing the less stable parts of the planet.
o All the non-natural gas sources of generation are winding down
at the end of their service lifetimes, and no more being built
(ignoring renewables, which are currently insignificant).
o We no longer have a store of energy -- we used to have many months
supply of coal stockpiled at power stations and weeks supply of
gas stored in gasometers -- all now gone.
o We now have very little in the way of spare generating capacity.
The nationalised electricity generating board used to maintain
spare capacity to enable peaks and unexpected outages to be
handled without concern, but the privatised companies mothballed
this plant as they are only paid for what they produce. It
would take between 3 months and a year to get it back in service,
depending how long it's been mothballed, so it's no use as an
energency reserve.

The industry had a wake-up call on 10 December 2002 when the country
got within a couple of minutes of having to load shed (switch off
parts of the country in an emergency due to not enough power being
able to be generated to meet demand). In spite of this, nothing was
done. Again last winter, there was a particularly cold spell forecast
and a number of experts warned we were in an even worse state than
the year before. Fortunately, the cold spell wasn't anything like as
bad as forecast. Given these wake-up calls have been ignored by the
government, it looks like it's going to have to get worse before
any notice is taken, and we probably are going to have to suffer a
significant load-shedding incident blacking out significant parts of
the country.

--
Andrew Gabriel